> WvDial is a modem dialer and nobody uses modems anymore.
I was using dial up until probably 2007 or 2008, and I was certainly using wvdial with it. The reason I was using wvdial is because it was the only option that actually worked. I think I tried to get Gnome's GUI to work, but was never able to. I think I still have the non-winmodem PCI card too, spent a lot of money (for a teenager) on it.
I remember my excitement for a Ubuntu Shipit CD quickly dissipating once I realized I couldn't use a USB-A cellular modem dongle, which was the only way for me to get internet connectivity at the time. This was even after having compiled a custom driver, and so on and so forth.
As a Linux newbie, this experience gave me an immense sense of revulsion towards the Linux desktop. However, one fine afternoon, I tried to boot up the Ubuntu partition, and try running the wvdial command instead of using Gnome PPP. Imagine my surprise when it just worked...
I remember my first paycheck from my first real job, I went out and bought a new modem. Don’t remember exactly what, but it was a big upgrade from the 2400 baud that came with my computer
There is also the question of inertia. People are used to certain software, and recommend this to others. In many cases I'd rather have a CLI that I know how to use, than a finnicky GUI that I don't.
Yep, also it works, and if it works, why change it?
Also the documentation exists.. find a 10 year old manual how to connect? Still works? Great! A rarity with modern software (and programming languages).
Also, since it's not really "exposed", lack of maintenance doesn't matter a long as it just works.
On using old software because of inertia or better features:
- MPlayer/MPV. Simple keys, click on the file and it just plays it. That's it.
- Pidgin with plugins.
- Mutt+lynx (for HTML email) with mbsync and msmtp. Batched email for important stuff when you must preserve your data against inferior solutions such as Discord.
- Lynx on gopher/http heavy sites calling external video and audio viewers. Good when bw is scarce, and gopher://gopherddit.com, gopher://hngopher.com and gopher://magical.fish have tons of services to use.
- wpa_passphrase+wpa_supplicant daemon+wpa_gui if you are in love with mice.
- find/xargs/rsync/moreutils/vidir/rclone: editing zillions of filenames in place with an editor and vidir, sync them, rename them... hell in Explorer, a piece of cake under Unix where you can use your favourite editor in a folder tree mounted with rclone and then batch-replace your whole remote directory subtree as if it was a text file. Old concept, science fiction for today's youngsters:
rclone mount yourcloudremoteshare: ./here
EDITOR=gedit vidir ./here/foo/bar/
And that's the simplest method. With find you don't even need to spawn an editor, with a command after exec you can run for instance
find ./here -type f -iname "*.pdf" -exec evince {} \;
to open the evince PDF viewer on all the PDF filenames you find in your remote.
> We originally created wvdial back in the late 1990's because setting up pppd 'chat' scripts was too annoying.
Yes, wvdial saved my ass back then. I remember pppd being incredibly confusing (not sure if it was, but I was only a teenager at the time.) Weird flashback to hear about this; I would have forgotten about it completely otherwise and yes, that is a sad state of things...
Circa 2009-2010 I was surprised to see instructions to use it for tethering on the Nokia N900. I guess the cellular data was still using the old AT command set.
There's an astonishing amount of things in the world which are not too hard to do, would be really useful and/or popular, yet no one really thought of making them. This also applies to software, BTW.
I think part of what would make these things so especially useful is that they'd be simple FLOSS packages. "VC-backed modern-WvDial-replacement-as-a-service" doesn't sound so useful, does it?
A little considered aspect of current "moderation" is that the mere need to create an account limits the total content volume And percentage of posted content which one would need to moderate.
It's almost like a variant of security through obscurity which actually has a meaningful impact.
Huh. I'm pretty sure that was largely obsoleted a while back (like, over a decade probably, not too long after this was written) by NetworkManager and ModemManager adding better handling for all the weird quirks that did actually matter with mobile broadband. It might still be possible to use it with the right manual configuration and additional software, but it'd mean dealing with badly documented quirks that are just handled for you by ModemManager.
I was using dial up until probably 2007 or 2008, and I was certainly using wvdial with it. The reason I was using wvdial is because it was the only option that actually worked. I think I tried to get Gnome's GUI to work, but was never able to. I think I still have the non-winmodem PCI card too, spent a lot of money (for a teenager) on it.