It seems a common trend now in all software projects that when something new is introduced, it must be inferior to the old system.
Oh, the developers will claim it’s superior, but it usually removes options, removes capabilities or the information is just presented in an incompetent way.
Here’s yes another example. Since “net-tools” is deprecated in Linux – which includes the common utility “ifconfig” – I’ve been using the replacement tools “ip” and related.
Though it is claimed far and wide that the replacement tools are superior and more powerful, every use case I’ve found places them as much inferior – and not just because I am used to the old way.
In every case, they are harder to use, give less and more poorly-formatted information and are just generally terrible.
For instance, this is the output of ifconfig. I often care about how much data an interface has sent or received and that is easy to see in a human-readable format:
It’s easy to see that the interface on my server has transmitted 475.9GB of data since the last time it was brought up.
Now here’s the, uh, “equivalent” output from ip, specifically the “ip –s link” command.
What’s that you say, you can’t read a bunch of numbers all jumbled together with no commas or human-readable indication of how much data has been sent? And what’s the IP address? Who fucking knows?
Well, I actually can read that, because I am so used to looking at this shit but even for me it’s much faster just to have it in GB already so I don’t have to spend the next second figuring out what unit I’m looking at.
And that’s true with every tool in the “ip” suite. Even if it’s nominally more powerful, it’s only more powerful in the strictly technical sense. From the usability perspective, it’s utterly pathetic and designed by guttercrud halfwits.
I grew up in a time where you looked forward to every release because it was guaranteed to be better, where every major release really improved your tools and the power of your platform.
No more. Now I dread each new release, knowing it will be worse, that required features will be removed, that ease of use will be thrown in the garbage to suit someone’s megalomania.
Bottom line is, geeks should be allowed to write all the code they want.
But they should never be allowed to design anything, ever.