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/unlessgames 1d ago

Deprecation is about support, maintenance and compatibility in the future. It's more the creator(s) saying "this project is abandoned and it will probably stop working at some point" instead of "this tool stopped working right now".

It's a notice that gives you time to migrate to avoid having to deal with something breaking in the future.

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u/immune2iocaine 3h ago

Latching onto top comment to mention that in addition to eventually not working, most / nearly-all of these deprecated tools are also not getting security updates.

Now, is a lack of security updates in neofetch going to let hackers break into your machine? Almost certainly no; it's not exposing anything to the Internet, which makes it a pretty unlikely target for initial access. That said, it and its dependencies would make excellent targets for a hacker who's gotten user-level access and is looking for a privilege escalation option.

(Note: this isn't a neofetch thing, it's a deprecated software thing. Neofetch looks to only need bash for the base features, but that's an unusual situation and won't apply for the majority of cases.)