NetworkManager was designed twenty years ago to switch between Wi-Fi and Ethernet on a laptop. Today it manages bonded interfaces, hundreds of VLANs, and container host networking across millions of machines, but the original architecture was never meant for this. A monolithic C daemon applying changes without transaction boundaries. The result: race conditions at boot, no reliable way to roll back a bad config, and a host-centric design never meant for containerized operation.

NM-next is a ground-up replacement, written in Rust, with one core architectural bet: a transactional state engine that powers two execution modes. A one-shot mode that applies config and exits with no daemon, no D-Bus, ideal for static servers and container hosts. And a daemon mode for environments that need continuous reconciliation. Same YAML, same rollback semantics, radically different deployment stories.

In 15 minutes, we'll show you how we're rebuilding Linux network management from the ground up.