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Most newer advanced networking is unavailable in ifconfig. ifconfig and route are now just there for backwards compatibility. The ip tool lets you do all of what ifconfig and route can do, and more.

I would typically agree with you; but the thing that I have really enjoyed in the transition to iproute2 is that ip handles all of: link state, address configuration, arp, tunnels, routing, transformation and a few other obscure things. It brings these together into one tool and unifies the argument syntax for all of them, I find it much easier to play with the network stack using 'ip'.

Ifconfig will fail completely in some cases.

Eg, an alias on a vlan on a bond.