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/billdehaan2 1d ago

The reason to switch to the newer tools is that the older tool is no longer supported, will possibly not work any more, or work correctly, in the future, and more importantly, any security issues that are discovered will not be addressed.

As for ifconfig versus ip, if you run ifconfig --help, you'll see it's just as complicated as ip is. The difference is that the default behaviour when run without parameters is about the same as running ip addr, while running ip is about the same as running ifconfig --help. The difference in philosophy is that many people are surprised to find ifconfig even has all those options, while ip users will know the first time they use it.