What modern utilities should be a standard part of a modern unixy distro?
As a long time user of utils-linux, I can say this: purge!<p>We need a big, big, huge purge of this ancient decrepit nonsense.  We don&#x27;t need blkid, lsblk, fdisk, wipefs, parted, df and a bunch of other lopsided semi-functional horrors to ask questions about storage.  Just one program that works.<p>We need integration of MD, DM, LVM and possibly stuff like Btrfs volumes.  ZFS was close to it.  And commands associated with these utilities need to make sense in the way they are named and associated with each other.  The way it needs to work is something like:<p><pre><code>    $ storage volume-manager physical-volumes list
</code></pre>
(This doesn&#x27;t mean you have to type it out in full, useful abbreviations would still apply, but there must be a way to spell it out so that non-initiated may understand the purpose and the reason of the &quot;spell&quot;)<p>Instead of guessing whether you should run <i>pvdisplay</i> or <i>btrfs subvolume list</i><p>Networking seemed like it went in this direction sometime ago with iproute2, but it&#x27;s still not enough.  Stuff like nmcli or all kinds of nslookup, ss and so on need to be brought under one roof, generic enough to allow extensions and implementations by different concrete programs.<p>Today, just in order to find the configuration of one&#x27;s network interfaces one must scout different places on their filesystem and try to figure out what utility is reading those and whether it&#x27;s able to understand the config, and whether there&#x27;s any other config in some other place that overrides the one they are looking at.