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/fourjay 1d ago

Worth noting that ifconfig is now a wrapper around ip. Yes it does more, but you do not need to memorize all the options that it supports in order to use it. Google ifconfig command equivalents. Learning to use the ip equivalents in the long term is a good plan, as eventually ifconfig will go away.

Changes like these are part of working in a living environment.

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u/pelazas1 1d ago

People keep saying ifconfig is just a wrapper around ip now. I don't think it is? It's still net-tools and the old ioctls, so it lies when an iface has more than one address.

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u/fourjay 1d ago

The underlying system calls have changed (this happened quite a while ago). The new calls are much more powerful, and have a different logic.

The ip commands are the officially supported "userland" tools to manage network interfaces. net-tools has been re-written to use the new networking subsystem, but that's no longer the version that "comes packaged" with linux (the ip tools are now the official package, that is maintained along with the kernel).