I think NetworkManager is only the default for laptops,
while wicked would be used on other machines.

Is this a laptop? Wired or Wireless connection?

(In reply to Bernhard Wiedemann from comment #1)
> I think NetworkManager is only the default for laptops,
> while wicked would be used on other machines.
> 
> Is this a laptop? Wired or Wireless connection?

My installation is under VMware Workstation. The host system is a laptop with both wired and wireless connections (both shared with guest as virtual wired connection through NAT).

I just reinstalled a VM from scratch and verified that my bug description was not totally correct: the network connection is actually available out of the box, served by wicked. I was confused by the fact that the KDE NetworkManager tray applet is still loaded by default even when NetworkManager service is disabled, and incorrectly shows the network as not available.

Created attachment 609954 [details]
screenshot

from https://openqa.opensuse.org/tests/27169/modules/xterm/steps/1

OK, so the summary is that
after a default DVD KDE install,
network is working via wicked,
but KDE shows NetworkManager's disconnected-link-icon in the bottom right
which is at least confusing

(In reply to Bernhard Wiedemann from comment #4)
> OK, so the summary is that
> after a default DVD KDE install,
> network is working via wicked,
> but KDE shows NetworkManager's disconnected-link-icon in the bottom right
> which is at least confusing

Yes, exactly. I also dearly miss the possibility to get in a simple way from the applet information about IP / MAC address / throughput of each connection, when NetworkManager service is disabled, but indeed the major point is the misrepresentation of the status.

*** Bug 902496 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

As far as I know there is no graphical frontend for Wicked.  The plasma-nm (KDE NetworkManager) is a frontend for NetworkManager. Which as far as I know is still the default for openSUSE and both GNOME and KDE rely on NetworkManager as the default. 

How did wicked ended up to be in control of the network interfaces ? Was this chosen during install ? 

At this moment there is no alternative then to remove manually plasma-nm from the installation. In the future with KDE Frameworks I believe that plasma-nm is only loaded in the systray if it detects a running NetworkManager

possible solution would be to drop 01-plasma-nm.js from plasma-nm, and extend plasma-disable-networkmanager.diff patch from kdebase4-workspace:

-    if (!applets.contains("org.kde.networkmanagement")) {
+    if (!applets.contains("org.kde.networkmanagement") && !QDBusConnection::systemBus().interface()->isServiceRegistered("org.freedesktop.NetworkManager") {


(yeah, as coolo wrote in orig. patch, it is kinda fragile, but i don't know what else we could do - this is also similar to upstream's approach in Plasma 5)

This should be fixed with Leap/TW now as it is properly hidden in plasma5.