Comment 9 for bug 366780

What is wrong is that it is only possible to set whether nm should automatically connect to a network or not. It would be much preferable if we could also tell it a preference relationship between these network that we automatically connect to.

This would mean we could order the list of networks ourselves, and not letting it be ordered by recency.

This is valuable because networks have different speed, security, reliability, level of service.

For example, at my university exist several wifi networks : a closed one and a "free access" one. I prefer accessing to the closed one whenever it is available, but when the closed one is not available (as is on some parts of the campus), I would still like to connect automatically to the free access one.

With the current behaviour, if I go to a part of the campus where only the free access network is available, this one will become the most recently used. As a result, if I later find myself powering up my laptop in a part where both networks are available, nm will connect to the free access network, which is not what I want.

The requested behaviour seems easier to implement than the existing one, because there is no need to track the recency of the usage of the networks. The GUI would have to be a little modified, for example to show a list of networks that we do not automatically connect to, and a list of networks that we do automatically connect to, the latter having "Move up" and "Move down" buttons.