Comment by tokyobreakfast
11 days ago
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Apple still includes uucp for some unknown reason.
The saving disk space argument makes no sense because telnet was one of the smaller binaries in /usr/bin.
Telnet continues to be widely used for select use cases and being told we're naughty by not including it feels punitive and just adds extra steps. What are you supposed to do, trash a $1m piece of industrial equipment because Apple wants to remind you Telnet is insecure?
New devices are still being released with Telnet where SSH is impractical or unnecessary.
There are many things I want to say in reply to this. So I’ll bullet point them:
* yes, do not buy equipment that has acquired so much tech debt that it still requires telnet.
* there are a million telnet clients out in the world. And ones far better than the default OS one. Apple not shipping one standard is not the end of the world or really anything more than a mild inconvenience for the small handful of people who need actual “Telnet” as opposed to Netcat or socat, both of which are far better than base Telnet.
> yes, do not buy equipment that has acquired so much tech debt that it still requires telnet.
No, you already own this capital equipment. It's the laptops running macOS that are ephemeral and disposable.
I don't care for excuses or workarounds; why did they do it?
It was an explicit decision whilst leaving a lot more—arguably more useless—garbage in.
Every OS that removed telnet did so for a symbolic reason, not because it was helpful technically.
It seems rather typical for Apple. The removal of the headphone jack obsoleted thousands of consumer devices.
You can have it, it’s not on the base install.
99% of Mac users never use it, directly or indirectly. Asking that they have it anyway is a self centric view.
You can still have Telnet!!!
It just isn’t installed by default when 99% of users have no desire for it.
Ubuntu and derivates removing telnet from the default install, along with other basic tools like traceroute etc, was one of the driving factors toward me creating my own distro. I'm sick of basic stuff being omitted because somebody just decided it's not needed anymore.
How on god’s green earth is `sudo apt install telnet` sufficiently challenging to be a driving factor to creating your own distro??
Because I go long periods of time without internet access, and I don't want to have to "sudo apt install" a fucking thing, ever. Especially not a tiny utility that is all of 172k in size, that I might need for something. Understand?
I want EVERYTHING that I might use installed AT ALL TIMES, FROM DAY ONE, so that I can IMMEDIATELY USE IT when required.
This is only one of many reasons why I abandoned the giant dumpster fire that is mainstream Linux. I do not agree with their idiotic philosophy, on practically every level.
You've now discovered that there are sections of God's Green Earth that you never knew existed! One of many benefits of stepping outside the Matrix for a moment.
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