You would uninstall a lot of other stuff that depends on it of which cairo-dock is the most prominent on Elive.
In that sense, it might be an idea to look for another dock to have available for E16. 
"nmtui" is just a terminal ncurses interface to NM as the name shows, so: No nmtui will not be usable as that will be removed too.
EDIT
Since "network-manager" is a daemon .... you could see if stopping/de-activating network-manager makes any difference in your case. On my machine it only seems to work if network-manager hasn't already kicked in somewhere. 
You can do that with:
"sudo /etc/init.d/network-manager stop"
or:
"sudo service network-manager stop"
Obviously you can start or see the status of the service in a similar fashion
On my system too terminal indicates that networkmanager has been stopped but i still have internet access and the network manager icon in the shelf persists working.
It looks like permanently disabling Network-Manager.service doesn't affect the system either.
Use:
"sudo systemctl disable NetworkManager.service"
If things do go awry you can always enable it again with "enable" in that command. 
It does not , until you boot the computor again! and then no more network manager or wifi internet. 
I had to renable that service
That's strange I don't have that ... but then I boot straight into E23 on mine.
All in all, connman runs exceptionally well now that network-manager.service is disabled.
AFAIK systemd-networkd.service is the one that raises the network interfaces, although network-manager obviously will not run if it's service is disabled.
So if you're dependant on i.e cairo-dock icons/extensions or nmtui to connect you would need network-manager.service.
The system itself should connect using connman AFAIK.
My problem may be that i have not updated since 3.8.1 , Hate losing my settings and starting afresh from with the factory settings . I guess i just have to byte the bullet sometime
If you have run "apug" as well as enabling "elive-upgrader" (see the info on the "E23 - please expand" post) often, your system will be up to date except (maybe) the kernel which you can upgrade yourself.
On a side note .... Today's upgrade message:
I wouldn't call that a "small" issue, it's been bugging me for ages. 
I have been apugging like a missionary, but did not to elive-upgrader
Now got several errors messages like this on elive-uprader
"E: Failed to fetch http://repo.buster.elive.elivecd.org/pool/main/e/elive-daemons/elive-daemons_3.8.12+git2c57bc700-6buster1_all.deb File has unexpected size (117380 != 117384). Mirror sync in progress? [IP: 139.59.157.208 80]
Hashes of expected file: "
But elive-upgrader progresses without stopping skips over these. Now i cannot upgrade any more . apt-get update doesnot help . Any ideas?
Give it time to finish or reboot.
Been running E23 with network-manager.service disabled for 5 straight days now on my main laptop and have to state:
- Connectivity works exceptionally well. No glitches of importance when waking up after suspend or "lid-close" or reboot.
My idea: Bugger network-manager and use "connman" and "connman-gtk" by default, including E16 . 
How do i do that and set connman and conman-gtk to default? Looks like in my case they look for networkmanager and when they dont find it , they throw a hissyfit
Nope, no need to set connman to default .... if network-manager doesn't come up then connman keeps on running.
Connman is the one that always runs and gets taken over by network-manager. You can check on your system if it's running with:
~ ❯❯❯ sudo service --status-all |grep connman
[ + ] connman
Where you should see a + sign if it's loaded
If it isn't running (for some strange reason) you can enable it (permanently) with
"sudo systemctl enable connman.service"
- To see what it's up to, use:
"systemctl status connman.service"
To check wether network-manager is indeed turned off:
~ ❯❯❯ sudo service --status-all |grep network
Resulting in:
[ - ] network-manager
[ + ] networking
~ ❯❯❯
And of course, have "connman-gtk" installed for a GUI.
Succeeded but still having finicky wifi performance on this particular laptop, while other devices are perfectly okay. Network manager is gone. Is it possible to configure WICD? I have it on the laptop but it doesnot see the wireless card, probably the Chalk it down to probably a hardware problem.
Very probably.
What you can try is to install the latest available kernel and see if that helps.
Small HowTo:
- Determine the kernel version you are running with
"uname -r"
- Find out what kernels are available:
:apt-cache search kernel-image" and determine which one you want/need. Stick to the same type of kernel, only bump up the release number ... current is 5.5.0-0.bpo.2
- Install it: `"api linux-image-[version_you_chose] linux-headers-[same_version_chosen]"
- Wait until the install finishes. There will be a lot going on in your terminal screen, don't be alarmed.
- Reboot
If it wont boot the new kernel then boot into the old via "advanced options" in the grub start-up screen.
its a shame that NM has not an option like in /etc/default/network-manager to simply disable the daemon 
@triantares can you update the first post to explain how to disable it the correct way? (maybe move the thread to a howto too?)
heh, you should insist more 
BTW for everyone following this thread, there's a new thread talking about the features that adds actually using network-manager: Why we use Network-manager
