Network configuration in Linux
To access the internet, you need the following components:
The driver of the network device installed and enabled. (See Linux drivers for more details.)
A network manager to manage your network devices ;p
A DNS resolver to access domain names which are aliases to IP addresses.
There are competing components to manage your network configurations.
There is NetworkManager that has been the standard way for managing networks. It is being used in roam:GNOME as the backend for their network management interface.
If you're using systemd-ful environment, you can start with systemd-networkd.