Newer versions of Ubuntu and even Debian seem to be a total pile of shit when it comes to managing your network interfaces. I guess they figure it is best to hide as much as possible from the user through various layers of obfuscation so that one day they'll be able to remotely manage your network interfaces for you and hook you up to the new NSA network.

Anyways, the instructions below came mostly from me screwing around all night on a Xubuntu VM, but this link is where the rc.local thing came from.

This leaves network-fucking-manager in place so you can (I think) still use that to manage wifi networks. Maybe wicd would be better for that?

$ sudo ifconfig -a

write down name of your interface (mine was enp0s3)

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install dnsutils
$ sudo apt-get purge netplan.io
$ sudo rm /etc/resolv.conf
$ sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf

# Ubuntu sucks, here is my dnscrypt-proxy listener
nameserver 127.0.0.1

$ sudo nano /etc/rc.local

#!/bin/bash
# use the interface name from above)
dhclient enp0s3
exit 0

$ sudo chmod 755 /etc/rc.local
$ sudo reboot