WiFi6 icons in network manager applet

Brainstorm
1

Hi everybody :slight_smile:

I’d like to have a very simple feature added to plasma network-manager applet that would have saved me some searching the web for answers…

I have a notebook/laptop with WiFi6 support. I wasn’t sure about support for it in Linux and KDE in general so I had to check infos about connections through the command line to be sure I was connected with WiFi6.

In Android and other places it seems that whenever in a ax conenction the network icon changes to something like this
signal-2023-06-13-072856_002

This might be helpful for other use cases (like WiFi6E and so on).

Thank you all in advance :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Thanks for the idea! But a counterpoint: Is this information important enough to show to the user? My sense is that most people don’t even know that there are versions of WiFi.

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The use case I see is when people switch their WiFi equipment and they see it supports WiFi6 or later but it is really hard to access this info in Linux. So, they might end up thinking Linux does not support it.

There is also the issue that Android shows it and people IMHO end up expecting it to be shown everywhere.

Maybe it doesn’t need to show in the icon itself, but it could show int he details tab? I think this kind of info might be useful even if not in the icon itself.

I did not do any prior benchmarks/research… maybe we could check what is the default in Windows, MacOS, iPhone, other DEs and so on.

In any case, thanks for your awesome work in KDE @ngraham :slight_smile:

2 Likes
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I agree, that it makes more sense in the “Details” tab.

Just a personal thought, but a lot of those indicators on phones I think are meant more for marketing… think of the whole 5G rollout fiasco, US carriers in particular were trying to slap a new sticker on everything (so people are willing to buy newer phones, and sign more contracts, etc). We should definitely expose this information in some way to the user :slight_smile:

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Details tab would work well - we can show the Wi-Fi generation and frequency (we probably already show freq?).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_6
Screenshot_20230617_074207

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In fact, adding an icon is very simple (you can add an array from all sides there). Here I will say that this is quite useful (only the SVG versions are needed). I do not think that this will hurt anyone, but for those who need it, it will be useful.
Sorry for my bad English.

1 Like