Comment 58 for bug 540070

Just distribution upgraded Xubuntu from 14.04 to 14.10 and ended up unable to connect to any wireless network. As above, the error was "bad password", which I knew was not the case. I had already determined that the upgrade included network-manager, which I had previously replaced with wicd because network-manager doesn't provide enough information to help when there are problems connecting wirelessly, and makes life really difficult when using a static IP is necessary. After reading the above, I found nothing in the network-manager settings that simply shut it off completely, so I removed network-manager (sudo apt-get autoremove network-manager), after which wicd 1.7.2.4 connected without a problem. So whatever the cause of this bug, it's still there, and it may not be a wicd bug, but a network-manager bug.

When I had the original problem with network-manager, I searched the Internet for best network-managers, and the general consensus was wicd, with which I had previously had little but all good experience, so that's what I installed. On other machines with KDE, I have network-manager installed, but it has been somewhat of a pain in the nether regions.

I'm still coming up to speed on linux, and my biggest gripe is that every flavor of linux seems to feel obliged to use a different version of something, even if it's not nearly the best or even much worse. So unless Ubuntu knows what network-manager can do that wicd cannot do that is so great that it offsets the fact that network-manager isn't as friendly or as reliable as wicd, they should be asking themselves just how they hope to benefit in the OS races by continuing to make it part of their desktop packages.