[ilyt]

There is definite lack of a declarative tool that glues it all.

Typical hardware switches and routers just have one (sometimes expanded by includes/macros but still) config syntax to control every part of networking stack.

So you can configure interface and set its vlans all in one place instead of creating a dozen of ethX.Y devices then crerating a bunch of brY bridges and then attaching the interfaces to them

In linux instead you'd be using iproute2 set of tools to configure interfaces and static routing, iptables for IP ACLs, ebtables for ethernet ACLs (or now nftables I guess), without any tool to apply/revert changes at once

Many tried doing that but IMO haven't seen anything good.

Many also try to "simplify" iptables and all it ends up is me being annoyed coz I know which iptables commands I need to run but I need to translate it back into "higher" level config syntax. One exception being ferm ( http://ferm.foo-projects.org/ ), because it keeps iptables-like keywords just expands on that, but it is iptables only and kinda superseded by nftables syntax anyway.

[epcoa]

iptables/ebtables is deprecated even in RHEL. While people are free to continue not to transition to nftables complaining about problems with iptables after a decade of its replacement is a bit silly.