General user-friendliness should be addressed as well. See this bug and this upstream issue.

Not quite with the spirit of this task but usefull.
Currently nm-tray is the only status icon that is dark over dark with papirus, making it difficult to see. That's because the icons it is using are the "symbolic" If you change it to non-symbolic that will be solved. The only problem is tha when clicking the icon there appear a listo of options with icons (like active connections) and that list has a light background and now that the icons are light they don't see well in that case, but the text is dark so it can be read.
Final solution should be to change symbolic icons to none symbolic and make the colors (background and fonts) of the list change with the theme.
the icon names should be change in the file src/icons.cpp

@hmollercl could you please file a separate task as a subtask of 19.10 and perhaps even file a pull request upstream?

On the user-friendliness, problem is that network-manager would need to support a lot of connection types. In case of network manager-gnome it supports (w/o -gnome is the protocol with -gnome is the gui):
network-manager-fortisslvpn-gnome/disco 1.2.8-2 amd64
network-manager-fortisslvpn/disco 1.2.8-2 amd64
network-manager-iodine-gnome/disco 1.2.0-3 amd64
network-manager-iodine/disco 1.2.0-3 amd64
network-manager-l2tp-gnome/disco 1.2.10-1 amd64
network-manager-l2tp/disco 1.2.10-1 amd64
network-manager-openconnect-gnome/disco 1.2.4-2ubuntu1 amd64
network-manager-openconnect/disco 1.2.4-2ubuntu1 amd64
network-manager-openvpn-gnome/disco 1.8.10-1 amd64
network-manager-openvpn/disco 1.8.10-1 amd64
network-manager-pptp-gnome/disco 1.2.8-2 amd64
network-manager-pptp/disco,now 1.2.8-2 amd64 [instalado, automático]
network-manager-ssh-gnome/disco 1.2.8-1 amd64
network-manager-ssh/disco 1.2.8-1 amd64
network-manager-strongswan/disco 1.4.4-2 amd64
network-manager-vpnc-gnome/disco 1.2.6-2 amd64
network-manager-vpnc/disco 1.2.6-2 amd64

maybe we could nm-tray make open network-manager-gnome for configuring (instead of the shell) and make that network-manager-gnome don't autostart so we don't end up with 2 tray icons.

I found this python3 library if someone wants to do this in python:
https://packages.debian.org/sid/python3-networkmanager
https://pypi.org/project/python-networkmanager/
https://github.com/seveas/python-networkmanager
look at the examples
https://github.com/seveas/python-networkmanager/tree/master/examples

Hi @hmollercl, I'll take a look at it.

This needs to be solved before the LTS.

@miker256 did you make any progress with this?

@wxl, I didn't make much progress

@miker256 still something you're into taking on, though?

FURTHER CONCERNS:

If you aren't using nm-applet it will FAIL to handle advanced cases of credential prompting, etc. for imported VPN configurations which don't store the user/passwords or need specialized things like 2FA (becoming more and more prevalent nowadays).

If we're going to include the problem of no GUI management for nm-tray, we also need to handle the problem of "No agent able to handle request for credentials" which is now confirmed *today* in Focal dailies. (I was testing a different OpenVPN issue, but found more about this one.)

@teward is the same as this? https://github.com/palinek/nm-tray/issues/44

I can confirm that edit connections now opens the Advanced Network Configuration now. @wxl should we close this one up?

@kc2bed sadly, no. While I agree that D82 works as intended to automatically use nm-connection-editor as opposed to nmtui-edit and while I see that as a vast improvement, it's still not the Qt-based solution we want. We probably should drop this from 20.04, though.

In T29#3171, @wxl wrote:

@kc2bed sadly, no. While I agree that D82 works as intended to automatically use nm-connection-editor as opposed to nmtui-edit and while I see that as a vast improvement, it's still not the Qt-based solution we want. We probably should drop this from 20.04, though.

That makes sense to me. I moved it to 20.10.