NetworkManager 1.2 debuts with improved security & Wi-Fi usability (or so they say).
Personally, long ago, I dropped Network Manager for WiCD, but maybe the new Network Manager version 1.2 is finally usable?
The official announcement says it should make the list of available access points more responsive and manageable, save energy on mobile devices and laptops, and even improve privacy by MAC address randomization when searching for an access point.
They say they adopted RFC7217 for improved protection against tracking:
They say the access point list is now maintained by wpa_supplicant and no longer grows insanely large if you travel between access points:
One key reason I dropped Network Manager for WiCD was that the command line interface wouldn't do half the things I needed, but they say they've improved it so that's it's actually usable now (they say):
They even say they improved the nmcli so that it works well with vpn
In the guts, they replaced dbus-glib with native D-Bus support and libnl-route-3 and avahi-autoipd are no longer used.
They say they managed /etc/resolv.conf better also: