Network manager is particularly annoying. It doesn't seem to like static IP addresses at all, sure the GUI will allow you to assign them but it doesn't actually seem to affect the system at all.
I tried disabling NetworkManager since on my development box I like to have a number of static IPs assigned to it for testing on the LAN. However I also want to be able to easily connect to wireless networks and I can't find an easy way to do that without NM (I tried wickd but had other issues with that).
The upshot of this is that I have to use NM with some bash scripts that run on login to overwrite some of it's settings.
Did you file a bug for that behavior? It sure doesn't seem to behave like that for me.
While I cannot and won't claim that you're wrong, this is not supposed to be the case (and isn't in my private and professional experience).
You acknowledge that NM is 'easy' for wifi, but try hard to abandon it for reasons that are unclear. Except for tracking down the real error/filing bugs: Why couldn't you just set up a simple rule on the dhcp server (which I assume you have, at least for your wifi connections) to hand out static leases for your dev box?
Mentioning 'sound' in the end, in this way and out of context, is borderline trollish (I might be wrong, but I assume this is a suppressed pulseaudio rant there).
The issue with static IPs & Network Manager is posted all over the internet (just google "network manager static ip" so I assume they know about it already. Frankly I don't know enough about how NetworkManager works to dig into the source code and isolate the issue, since it's been ongoing for a while and I'm not the only person experiencing it I'm going to assume it would not be a simple fix.
I could use dhcp rules but then I sometimes have to move my development machine to other places where of course I will be on a different dhcp server which I may not have admin access to. The workaround of having a shell script that sends a bunch of "ifconfig" commands does the job for me whilst still allowing me to use NM for wifi config but it just seems like something that should be unnecessary.
I sort of assume that most experience Linux people have experienced some sound issues at some point. My problem with pulseaudio has always been the slight latency that seems to happen between sound being sent by the program and played by the speakers which means that for example when an MP3 file is paused the sound continues for a fraction of a second. Sure this may not be a huge issue and I didn't even notice it for a while but as soon as I noticed it, it really started to grind on me. Not to mention that it makes the system terrible for doing any kind of audio editing.
The solution for this is to uninstall pulseaudio and go back to ALSA which is a bit of a pain in itself, but once you've achieved this you get odd problems like (in ubuntu anyway) the sound control panel applet disappears and you have to run alsamixer to change the volume, also volume control for some programs (such as spotify) stops working completely.
There are a number of other various small issues that can make desktop Linux a pain to use sometimes, this is why I am often surprised that canonical seem to prioritize redesigning the GUI every few releases over fixing stuff like this.
Duckduckgoing 'network manager static ip' really came up with a variety of reports. But a good number of explanations how this is supposed to work as well, in the top.
I'm sure you tried a couple things before you decided that it's just not working the way you like it, but for me it seems that static IPs, your way, should be no problem [1,2,3] with the on-board tools.
Sound: Never had that (or any related) issue since I stopped running weird apps under wine and I light a candle for Lennart every other day for a sound solution that just works in my world, whatever I throw at it.
Yes, I've been down that route with setting things in network manager config and had them wiped out when doing Ubuntu updates.
The real problem here is that if you set multiple static IPs in NM GUI it will lie to you and tell you that it has done it when it hasn't. This is pretty dire UX.
The audio issues with spotify were from running the native Linux client, oddly the volume control in the Windows/Wine version works fine with alsa (although a recent update to spotify seems to have broken wine compatibility almost entirely).
Kind of limited with VPNs too. It would be great if you could simply import an OpenVPN configuration file, but in some cases the only solution is to skip Network Manager and start/stop the service from the command line.
I tried disabling NetworkManager since on my development box I like to have a number of static IPs assigned to it for testing on the LAN. However I also want to be able to easily connect to wireless networks and I can't find an easy way to do that without NM (I tried wickd but had other issues with that).
The upshot of this is that I have to use NM with some bash scripts that run on login to overwrite some of it's settings.
Don't get me started on sound..