Shop does not work if the active default network is not managed by network-manager

[mutech]

This is partly a duplicate of #83.

The problem

The computer has a perfectly functioning Internet connection through an interface that is managed by systemd-networkd. Network-manager is active and managing now-inactive Wifi-connections, which are only used when not connected to a wired network (via networkd). Apt and flatpak work perfectly fine.

The shop however warns that there is no network connection, and even though I can click on "ignore" and start the installation, this does not work and I also get no notifications about software updates (since about 2 weeks).

Is this really a bug in the shop?

The shop uses a mechanism to discover the availability of an Internet connection in order to improve the user experience. The benefit for the user is, that instead of a potentially misleading or hard to understand error message from various underlying package managers, you present an easy to understand warning before the error even occurs. Awesome.

This mechanism however is either not working correctly or not the right mechanism to use for this purpose, because it does not check for the availability of an internet connection, it only checks for the availability of such a connection that is managed by network-manager.

As a result, the user in my particular situation, receives an even more confusing error, which is the false claim that there is no network connection (in fact there is). This is definitely a bug. Alternative facts belong to politics.

Even worse, as a consequence of this "usability" improvement, the shop can not be used at all and on top of that, I did not receive crucial update notifications for quite a while without any warning. I could have missed security updates and that could have lead to severe harm, because I rely on being notified of such updates.

Considering that the software update service consumes considerable resources (1G ram is quite a lot for that purpose), this looks like a solid bug to me.

"The shop does not do network management"

If that was true, the shop would work. If fails because it uses the wrong or a buggy network management tool to obtain a network status while it actually receives a network management status.

"We only support Network-manager"

If your stance is that Pop!-OS does not "support" alternative network management tools (alternative to Network-Manager) and that as soon as I use systemd-networkd, I have to expect any crucial OS functionality to fail, that is fine, but it would also make me abandon Pop!-OS, because such a restriction would make it unusable for me.

Workarounds

• I can start a Wifi-Connection to update software using the shop. But that does not solve the problem with notifications.
• I can just use Network-Manager (see next section)
• I can just use apt and flatpak to manage updates and software myself. Sure, but that's the worst possible consequence of a bug in a piece of software - abandon it.

Why not use Network-Manager?

I'm running Pop!-OS on a laptop with NVidia Hardware for two reasons. One is to get painless support for NVidia - as painless as it gets - you're doing a great job there. The other one is because I like your Cosmic WM, even the Gnome version, because the mixed tiled/floating approach serves me better than all alternatives I know.

I'm using this laptop in mixed work/private/customer-specific environments. Depending on the context I'm working in, I have a rather complex network setup. Network-manager can of course be used to handle that, but it has a lot of quirks. One is that it take a long time to bring up a bridged wired network connection which results in various VM's and containers failing to start which in turn has all kinds of negative consequences. I'm certain this can be fixed, but I didn't find a solution in 8 hours while it took me 20 minutes to setup a netplan configuration with networkd that preserves all the desired network-manager functionality (manage Wifi and VPN via GUI on the road and have a working network in the office) and at the same time works smoothly in this complex scenario.

Of course my use-case is not mainstream. It's a combination of my WM preferences and my dislike for Canonical that made me choose Pop!-OS on a professional work station, the fact that this is a laptop used most of the time in a stationary context but sometimes on the road and a really complex network to integrate this thing into.

But I'm not using any exotic tools here. This is systemd-networkd. It's already installed on Pop. I'm using only preinstalled software and the way I am using it is very mainstream. When I see a bage on the Shop-Icon I click on it to install updates. When I need to install software manually (which is very rare because most stuff runs in VMs or Containers), I open the shop and install it. I have an internet connection.

Cost-Benefit for fixing or ignoring this bug

The benefit of this shop-feature for mainstream users is minimal, if for no other reason than that they might at any time still be confronted with cryptic or misleading error messages when a connection fails after an installation has been started. You reduce the risk of such error message and possible support calls resulting from them, but I doubt that as a result of this many Pop-Users will never see network errors.

Ignoring this bug will drive a very small number of users away from Pop!-OS, because for them the lack of a core feature such as the software-installer is reason enough for a change. I personally can live with that, I know how to use flatpak and apt. But I would still eventually leave Pop!-OS if it departs so far from Linux, that using ip add address will result in potential disaster.