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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Basically it's about the "ip" command and some net tools. The rest are a sideshow. And almost all things are both available, or even installed. So.. its a rant in disguise.

"stop being old people" ok...

meanwhile, over in BSD.. these tools work fine

(I do however think tmux is a better choice than screen)

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As a long time ‘screen’ user, one thing I appreciated was that you could count on it to be installed on almost any machine you ssh into. Is ‘tmux’ one of those things where it’s safe to assume it’ll always be there?

Tmux is rarely ever there by default (only on OpenBSD that I know of), but it's always available. On the other hand, screen isn't available by default on many Linux distros either.

No matter how old the machine/distro, screen is packaged. Tmux is only packaged for recent distro versions.

  optimal% which screen
  screen not found
  optimal% uname -a
  FreeBSD optimal.algebras.org 14.1-RELEASE-p3 FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p3 GENERIC amd64
  optimal%

  magicpudding% uname -a
  FreeBSD magicpudding.local 13.3-RELEASE-p4 FreeBSD 13.3-RELEASE-p4 n257491-41f6a830f8e TRUENAS amd64
  magicpudding% which screen
  magicpudding%

packaged, not installed

Are you running a lot of systems on over-decade-old OSs? Because tmux isn't really new anymore

I like screen, but I think newer versions of rhel don’t have it

No. A major downside. But cross distro/os screen wasn't reliably available either. Which also socks.

When dealing with UNIXs like AIX, screen is the only choice.

Plus I noticed it is a bit lighter than tmux. But there was one odd instance where I had a minor issue with screen, I forgot what it was.

FWIW, tmux comes with NetBSD too, I suspect maybe it is there by default on FreeBSD too.

I also am an avid screen user. There are a number of places where I need a serial console and TMUX basically says "we will not support serial connections ever".

screen is way better than the alternatives for what I want. I never got minicom to work as smoothly as screen. It's just so clunky.

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