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Switching from NetworkManager to systemd-networkd on Fedora Linux 41 Workstation

April 12, 2025
Switching from NetworkManager to systemd-networkd on Fedora Linux 41 Workstation image
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Switching from NetworkManager to systemd-networkd on Fedora Linux 41 Workstation

TL;DR

This blog post documents how to switch from NetworkManager to systemd-networkd on Fedora Linux 41 Workstation.

Background

I have always been using NetworkManager on Fedora Linux Workstation. But sometimes my computer would refuse to enter suspend mode, or not work when resuming (“waking up”) from suspension.

journalctl -k showed that it was because of: “Freezing user space processes failed after 20.004 seconds (14 tasks refusing to freeze, wq_busy=0):” with all in state:D:

  • Task:NetworkManager
  • task:tailscaled
  • task:ipfs
  • task:gnome-software
  • task:transmission-gt
  • task:cody-agent28067
  • task:dnf5
  • task:packagekit-dnf-

These are all networking related, and the 1st likely caused the others.

Upon resume, systemtl status NetworkManager looks fine. But nmcli does not work anymore. And even sudo killall -9 NetworkManager does not help.

Cold reboot would fix it, of course - but PITA.

🐬 Flip Switch

systemctl status NetworkManager
sudo systemctl stop NetworkManager
sudo systemctl disable --now NetworkManager

systemctl status systemd-networkd
sudo systemctl enable --now systemd-networkd

networkctl
IDX LINK       TYPE     OPERATIONAL SETUP
  1 lo         loopback carrier     unmanaged
  2 enp23s0    ether    no-carrier  unmanaged
  3 eno1       ether    routable    unmanaged

networkctl status enp23s0
networkctl status eno1

ll /etc/systemd/network/

sudo bash -c "cat <<EOF >/etc/systemd/network/eno1.network
[Match]
Name=eno*

[Network]
DHCP=yes
EOF
"

sudo systemctl restart systemd-networkd

networkctl
IDX LINK       TYPE     OPERATIONAL SETUP
  1 lo         loopback carrier     unmanaged
  2 enp23s0    ether    no-carrier  unmanaged
  3 eno1       ether    routable    configurured

networkctl status eno1

sudo -K

systemd-resolved

I didn’t have to do anything about systemd-resolved, because this already seems to be running by default, at least on Fedora:

systemctl systemd-resolved

resolve.conf

I didn’t have to ln -s /run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf /etc/resolv.conf because this already seems to be so by default, at least on Fedora:

$ ll /etc/resolv.conf
lrwxrwxrwx. root root 39 B 2023-11-01 02:09  /etc/resolv.conf ⇒ ../run/systemd/resolve/stub-resolv.conf

References