firewalld

Raised as a usability problem by 4 people on Hacker News over 12 years (2014–2025), in 4 threads.

People raised many different problems with firewalld, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 6 complaints

Opening a single port is too hard; help output and man page are overly complicated2025-12-18
Unintuitive options, no helpful error hints, and poor documentation make it hard to use2025-12-18
Firewall-cmd is annoying and bizarrely designed to use2016-10-19
Hard to debug, unstable, and slows network speed2015-02-10
Firewalld stops responding and cannot be diagnosed or fixed without rebooting the server2015-02-10
Every operation requires arbitrary double-dash prefixes, which is irritating to type2014-08-30