I know I've mentioned plenty of times how I hate control panels, but driving to work today I realized that there was one control panel I actually liked and would love to use again. As I thought of this control panel, I had to think why I liked it so much, besides the obvious fact that it made such odious tasks like partitioning drives dead simple, and I figured out why I liked this particular control panel.
Unlike Insipid, Blech, Badminton or Torture Rack which tend to operate in a “black box” mode, this control panel gives you the option to actually view the commands it is about to run before you run them. A wonderful option so that if you need to know how it does something, you can see how it does something.
While there are other features I would love to see with Insipid, Blech, Badminton or Torture Rack (more on this below), this one feature would more than make up for all the missing features.
And the control panel?
SMIT (System Management Interface Tool) [1]
Written by IBM [2] for AIX [3], it is perhaps the best interface I've seen to system administration and I love the ability to see what commands are being run. Sad that no other control panel has this feature.
So yes, I don't hate all control panels, just anything that isn't SMIT (System Management Interface Tool).
[1] http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/aix/products/aixos/whitepapers/smit.html