I dont know, possibly, I see now that mii-tool is packaged together with ip. So really, it depends, it is different layers - different tools , but could still package all together into one package and have one syntax for all. wpa_supplicant and dhcpcd should go under the net-tools/ip package too.

ip link should also show the information of link-speed from mii-tool, ip addr should take an dhcp argument instead of requiring a separate dhcpcd. Then merge wpa_supplicant into ip, perhaps make a ip-wlink which requires some SSID/keyphrase to set it to "up" state.

So wpa_supplicant dhcpcd iwconfig/iwlist/scan-tools should be merged to net-tools and have same syntax as the rest of the net-tools package.

But yeah, even then you need to learn the layers and set them up. In my opinion Windows got it wrong, its user interface is horrible and people often complain about networking problems which are really UI problems or bugs in Windows/drivers there too.

This problem is classic - networking is a stack and thats a fact, and the best tools/UI is one which allows you to dig through that stack layer by layer. On windows its all or nothing.

It's not as complicated as it sounds in practice and can take the form of a simple config block in /etc/network/interfaces

        iface wlan0 inet dhcp

                wireless-essi DE:C0:D1:F1:ED  

                wireless-mode managed  

                wpa-ssid "Your SSID"  

                wpa-psk "YourPassword123"

I wrote a python app/CLI program for dealing with those couple of programs.

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/wifi/0.3.1

It works ok and just wraps ifup and iwlist. It also reads and writes /etc/network/interface style config, so you can see what's going on under the hood.

But I agree. Getting it all work the first time (or when I encounter a new type of network) is just ridiculous.