I find it disturbing.

One thing you notice if you have ADSL is that some services are built as if slower connections matter and others are not. Like Google's voice and audio chat services work poorly but most of the others work well. Uploading images to Mastodon, Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Nextdoor is reliable, but for Tumblr you have to try it twice. I don't what they are doing wrong but they are doing something wrong and not finding out what they're doing wrong because they're not testing and they're not listening to users.

Nobody consulted me about their decision not to run fiber by my house. If some committee decides to make ssh bloated they are, together with the others, conspiring to steal my livelihood and I think it would be fair for me to sue them for the $50k it would take to run that fiber myself.

It's OK if you work for Google where there is limitless dark fiber but what about people in African countries?

It's the typical corporate attitude where latency never matters: Adobe thinks it is totally normal that it takes 1-5s for a keystroke to appear when you are typing into Dreamweaver.

I agree with your general point that most companies/projects do a terrible job optimizing for slow computers/networks, but OpenSSH is from the OpenBSD people, who are well-known for supporting ancient hardware [0]. Picking a random architecture, they fully support a system with only 64MB of memory [1], and the base install includes SSH. So I suspect that OpenSSH is fairly well tested on crappy computers/networks.

[0]: https://www.openbsd.org/plat.html

[1]: https://www.openbsd.org/landisk.html#hardware

There's a good chance you have other options. Regardless of how you feel about the company's head, Starlink would probably be one of them, with likely better performance than you're dealing with on ADSL.

But you cannot just sue a company because their network connected software doesn't work well on slow networks. Let alone a project like OpenSSH. It would be like me suing a game studio because my PC doesn't meet their listed minimum requirements to play the game.

You're not ok with a security/privacy tool using defensive techniques because of ... the lack of fiber in Africa?

The openssh team does not owe you anything.

If you want a “1990s” mode, add it yourself or pay some to do it for you.

> One thing you notice if you have ADSL

This is funny to me, because ADSL used to be the fast thing, as opposed to dialup modems.

You just opened a huge nostalgia portal, never thought that Dreamweaver would still be around, I used that somewhere around 2003 I believe. Good memories