"Network Manager not running"

This is all very interesting, but, seeing as I am running Wicked, how do I get rid of the icon on my panel that tells me Network Manager is not running?

Right-click on the small up-arrow in the system tray and choose “System Tray Settings”.

You can hide it there (“Entries”), or disable it completely (“Display”).

But I already wrote this in comment #3

Thanks.

But I already wrote this in comment #3

Sorry. I knew I’d seen that somewhere recently, but I’d forgotten where.

Or just uncheck the box for “Network Management”.

Yes, that’s in “Display” and removes the applet completely.

Just a FYI
With my most recent “new” 13.2 install into a VM(not an upgrade),

I noticed that NM is installed although not used in a <standard install>.
The upshot is that although Wicked is being used, NM is installed and indicated not running… In other words, this is a simple install bug.

The likely proper solution is to simply uninstall NM as follows

zypper rm networkmanager

Problem solved.
Unless you really want to run NM in which case you would need to configured in YAST > Network Devices

TSU

No, that is on purpose, so that you can switch between Wicked and NM in YaST.

And this hasn’t changed in years. In 13.1 and earlier NM was installed although ifup was used by default. Unless the installer detects that this is a laptop (i.e. if a wireless device is present AFAIK), in which case it enables NetworkManager.

The only change is that Plasma-nm (which is completely new, a pre-release version was included in 13.1 but not installed by default) doesn’t hide itself when NetworkManager is not running, while the old plasmoid-networkmanagement did.

The likely proper solution is to simply uninstall NM as follows

zypper rm networkmanager

No, it is not.

This will also remove major parts of GNOME:

sudo zypper rm NetworkManager
root's password:
Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...
Resolving package dependencies...

The following 2 applications are going to be REMOVED:
  Epiphany "Tweak Tool" 

The following 37 packages are going to be REMOVED:
  epiphany epiphany-branding-openSUSE epiphany-lang gdm gdm-branding-openSUSE 
  gdm-lang gnome-session gnome-session-default-session gnome-session-lang 
  gnome-shell gnome-shell-browser-plugin gnome-shell-lang 
  gnome-shell-search-provider-contacts gnome-shell-search-provider-nautilus 
  gnome-tweak-tool gnome-tweak-tool-lang libNetworkManagerQt1 NetworkManager 
  NetworkManager-gnome NetworkManager-gnome-lang NetworkManager-lang 
  NetworkManager-openvpn NetworkManager-openvpn-lang NetworkManager-pptp 
  NetworkManager-pptp-gnome NetworkManager-pptp-lang NetworkManager-vpnc 
  NetworkManager-vpnc-gnome NetworkManager-vpnc-lang plasma-nm plasma-nm5-openvpn 
  plasma-nm5-pptp plasma-nm5-vpnc plasma-nm-lang plasma-nm-openvpn plasma-nm-pptp 
  plasma-nm-vpnc 

37 packages to remove.
After the operation, 47,1 MiB will be freed.

You can uninstall plasma-nm if you wanted to, but disabling/hiding it is good enough I’d say.

Ah, that also explains why my newly installed 13.2 desktop does not have the option of Network Manager as Network Setup Method: it was simply not installed. I trust that on a laptop it would be!

Network Manager may have been clunky, but it also did some very useful things on my desktop, such as allow me to set up Client-VPN connections! Will be missed.

Are you sure about that?

In my experience, NetworkManager is always installed. It is just not used in the default configuration.

Try: Yast –> Network Settings

and see if you can switch from “wicked” to “NetworkManager”.