Comment by RestartKernel
7 days ago
Trying to get Eduroam working soured me on NixOS as a desktop/laptop OS. If conventional methods fail, you're left with a completely non-standard OS designed to prevent quick hacks.
But NixOS spoiled my entire mindset around Linux. Going back to anything else feels like a massive downgrade. We would be better off today if declarative operating systems became the standard back when they could.
I just copied the certificate from the bottom of the official python script and setup wifi in gnome settings. Worked flawlessly until they changed something in december and it turned out I just needed username/password after that. Annoying that the simplification was entirely undocumented though
Wi-Fi should just work like any other Linux distro, assuming you have a desktop environment like GNOME or Plasma installed.
Probably not very helpful telling him that it should work!
eduroam is not your everyday WPA{2,3}-PSK, it's WPA2-EAP. There are official shell scripts to provision certificates, but they only seem to work on major distros, and for some reason the eduroam website made different scripts for every university. Also, for most people this is their first (and last) experience with 802.1X, especially setting it up themselves.
In my experience few years ago, it was a pain to set it up on everything except macOS and iOS (which come with eduroam certificates preinstalled in their trust stores).
But then it would suck equally as much on any other Linux distro, NixOS has no relevance here.
(I have also suffered from tying to connect to eduroam on Linux laptops).
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eduroam is less one network standard implemented by universities, more like, individual university networks that are set up similarly enough that they have a chance of talking to each other's auth servers and maybe working.
I ran NixOS while I attended university and don't remember any problems with this. Is it a NetworkManager issue?