It's the "go" (as in the game) of Linux distros. Easy to understand, long to master. For instance, I recently switched off of using netcfg to wpa_supplicant in

It's the "go" (as in the game) of Linux distros. Easy to understand, long to master. For instance, I recently switched off of using netcfg to wpa_supplicant instead. netcfg is an awesome way to manage network configs, but I am to the point that I enjoy and want to tweak my network configs to be faster (faster to get the network connection up, not faster throughput). Most distros will take a very safe, works-in-all-cases approach to networking and sacrifice some efficiencies that can be squeezed out of the process. Since the system is very simple to configure, I can easily dump all that cruft (and in this case the "cruft" is the already pretty lean and efficient netcfg) and just use ip, iw, and wpa_supplicant. It takes a bit of time to learn those tools, not long, but it's time. It's valuable because iproute2 is the Way going forward. Just one example, but there are plenty of others.