One aspect of sysadminship that I find cute (but suboptimal) is how we memorize this strings of commands that were clearly not quite designed to be used in that manner. A slightly related example is how our intents in our mind end up having commands that don't resemble at all what we actually want, creating a map between intent and command that is almost exclusively arbitrary except for some obsucre etymological origin that might or might not help you remember the command in a time of need.

For example:

Intent: "create a file"

Command: "touch $FILE"

As it happens, touching a file doesn't mean to create, it was supposed to touch to modify the last access date, like a null op. But now if you want to create a file you do that.

Intent: "Print a file contents to screen" Command: "cat $FILE"

Is this a reference to a feline? some slang for printing or reading? No it's short for concatenate, but if you pass just one argument instead of 2, it prints the concatenation of 1 file and nothing.

Even something as simple as

Intent: "Rename a file" Command: "mv $FILE"

Of ocurse there's the fact that moving a file and renaming the file are very similar if not identical in most FS/OS, but also, the slight change from a word to a proper-name style command already creates a style of command line interaction that was very natural in the 80s, but is now being reinvented with the advent of more powerful language decoding technology. So even:

Intent: "Copy a file" Command: "cp $FILE"

Now to the topic, you can see how my relationship with ss is the mapping:

Intent: "See a list of open ports" Command: "ss -tulnp"

Which I remember mnmemotecnically because it is close to -tulip. This is similar to ps -aux in that the command includes a set of options and I remember it mnemotecnically ("auxiliary" or "auxilio"), and I use the options even when I don't need them, modifying the options from that baseline if needed, like removing "a" to get just the current user's processes.

That said. I don't know if the future is going to be "better" alternatives to old tools, but rather deconstructing or making use of the concept of "binary":"command", running man and --help has never been an optimal solution, and let's be honest, kids nowadays are googling, stackoverflowing and chatgpting their intent in order to get a magical command.

No easy way to improve upon this at the userspace level, the OS model of delegating control to binaries based on a hierarchical command structure is sensible, and "magic", or sharing commands across binaries without a clear ruleset would be too opaque. But I feel that creating new tools while barely revolutionizing the way they work is too small an incremental change, it adds more noise, I'm not sure that ss2 or network-manager instead of wpa_supplicant is a better outcome, now you are just linearly increasing the cognitive demand of new sysadmins linearly with time.

Sorry to be a bummer.

I've just connected this to some other thought on Android app marketplaces.

Even in operating systems as distant as Android, we still have the phenomenon of using proper_names instead of natural names.

If you want a taxi or a cab, you don't ask your OS to get you a taxi or cab, you ask it to use the Uber binary.

In the 2000s it wasn't clear that this was going to be the case, the famous example of the pets.com domain was a wrong bet that natural names would somehow be important.

Instead natural names are only important when used through an obscure privately controlled algorithm like Google or StackoverFlow or ChatGPT, if you want to say "flights to Greece" instead of "Oobloo greece", you need a magical black box in the middle.