On Fri, Jan 31, 2020 at 10:01:23AM -0500, Greg Wooledge wrote:
The primary drawback of this method is that in the common case of a single-user home desktop system with a single NIC, the name "eth0" is expected to Just Work for whatever NIC happens to be in the system at the time.
It's also fundamentally unpredictable for the same reason that you can't just rely on the kernel name in the first place--even on the first install, if you have multiple NICs they will sometimes come up in a different order. For the single user/single nic desktop this isn't an issue, but if you're trying to on a large number of machines, and plug the LAN into (for example) the first on-board interface, it is a real PITA if sometime's that is eth0 and sometimes it's eth3 (or whatever) and that's a *much* harder problem to work around. (And really, in the single user/single nic desktop case, the user doesn't even *care* if the installer configures eth0 or foo11 because they don't need to know that. This is an issue mostly for people who know a little bit, want to tinker, and become irrationally angry when they need to learn something new.)