There seem to be some Unix/Linux developers who have a mysterious affinity for obtuse arcane time-wasting cognitive-load-increasing design. It's like they see the ability to master crufty badly designed systems as a badge of honor or something, or maybe it comes from a drive for job security or consulting hours.

Example: "systemctl list-units"

What's wrong with "systemctl ls"? What would have been wrong with a shorter command that's easier to type like "sys ls"? It's a core aspect of the system so a name like "sys" would have been appropriate, easy to type, and easy to remember.

Even worse the output of list-units has overly long lines and manages to be simultaneously hard for humans to read and hard for machines to parse. It uses white space as both a delimiter and within identifiers, making shell script parsing with "cut" etc. impossible.

The entire design is like this: obtuse, verbose, clunky, hard to type, hard to remember.

I absolutely loathe this stuff. Using it inspires fantasies of causing physical pain to its designers. A little bit of thought could have resulted in a clean, sparse, intuitive, and discoverable design with memorable commands and a straightforward configuration structure.

Don't get me started on abominations like Debian packaging or Windows drivers, though those are somewhat forgivable as their ugliness can be explained by their age and the need for backward compatibility. Systemd was a green field design from the 21st century so it has no excuse.

I've made enough aliases to make it useful and without having to type such a long name. It should definitely be a shorter name for such a critical piece of software.

One example is using user services vs system services and the various non-intuitive locations and name schemes of the various .service files.

The package management system regardless of distro is pkg the the service management is serv. This would also be helpful if you are using more than one system and needn't be complicated.

"Even worse the output of list-units has overly long lines and manages to be simultaneously hard for humans to read and hard for machines to parse. It uses white space as both a delimiter and within identifiers, making shell script parsing with "cut" etc. impossible."

It's the Microsoftization of Linux. This gives me bad flashbacks of Powershell where exactly what you describe is the case, where the simple is made difficult and the difficult made impossible.

The overengineered, bloated monstrosity that was CORBA also springs to mind. Systemd has been one of the worst things that have happened to Linux in recent years.

That said, the problem with "systemctl ls" would be that systemctl has commands to list multiple things things: units, socket, timers, dependencies, unit files, virtual machines, jobs.

I agree it's annoying that the output isn't formatted in more parsing friendly ways, though. Especially because there e.g. is an option to format the journal output in systemctl status as json -- why couldn't they do that for the main output too (indeed, I wish all tools had an option for that)

It's pointless arcana to boot. There is no reason whatsoever that a green field implementation of something so straightforward needs to be so obtuse.

If the complexity of interface exceeds the complexity of the information it needs to take and provide, it's bad design. If the command or UI structure uses arcane terms when straightforward terms exist, it's bad design.