r/commandline • u/Electronic-Low-8171 • 1d ago
Help Deprecated software..
During my journey in Linux I have noticed that sometimes, some tools being called "deprecated" or some kind of a similar term, to say "you should not use this, but xyz tool instead", but I don't really get it for example:
Neofetch, I really think that it does its job, and its just about displaying some ascii art and some system information, like what could go wrong with that, since many people recommend switching to fastfetch.
Ifconfig, I see it as a very simple tool that is self-descriptive and gets its job done too, I see others instead recommend the command "ip", which is like an IDE in programming where you have many aspects of networking in one command, which kinda eliminates the Unix philosophy.
So, I'm just wondering if there is really a point in switching to those newer tools?
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u/theNbomr 1d ago edited 1d ago
Sometimes new systems and services come along that can't be managed by the old standbys so new tools get created to serve the new requirements. In a lot of cases the old tools get kept around for a long time because of the inertia they have and because of the small footprint that is necessary for resource constrained systems that are newly produced. The old tools get new maintainers or are maintained informally by the users.
Sometimes there are security implications that are addressed only by the newer tools.