# SSH 57 Hacker News commenters recommended SSH and 17 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Lets you log in to and run commands on remote machines, and tunnel other traffic over an encrypted connection. Critics agree it is slow for bulk data transfer and chatty on each keystroke. ## Why people recommend it - Already installed on most machines (4 comments): "plain old SSH means a metric bajillion computers have a client for your game built in" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724680)) "all you need is an SSH connection that everyone already has" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001465)) "ssh is simple, works on most servers I have access to" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49398587)) - Tunneling, port forwarding, SOCKS proxy (4 comments): "I can use ssh as the transport and authentication layer over any internet connection" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47164236)) "The best part of this is you can daisy chain tunnels" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48669956)) "An ssh port forward will do this with aplomb." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46706351)) - Pairs with tmux for remote work (4 comments): "Really just worth learning SSH and Tmux instead of building your workflow against something that's trying to replace them" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49985577)) "SSH with tmux or some editor with SSH server support should be your dev setup." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48474356)) "you're better off mosh/ssh-ing into the server and using Emacs there" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45943905)) - Strong encryption and key authentication (4 comments): "SSH is not at all risky if you disable password authentication" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46896522)) "SSH offers more than just encryption, but also data integrity" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46984997)) "I love how simple SSH is with it's PK-Auth." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48672575)) ## What people warn about - Poor performance and slow bulk transfers (4 comments): "Did you know SSH has long-standing performance limitations due to its design that need patches to eliminate?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46728472)) "SSH was never really meant to be a high performance data transfer tool, and it shows." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46857192)) "SSH is bottlenecking in its code at ~500 Mbps per core which is ludicrously slow" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46724399)) - Chatty; high latency per keystroke (4 comments): "The fix seems kind of crazy though, adding so much traffic overhead to every ssh session." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46725000)) "the SSH protocol is inherently very chatty" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46730387)) "On ssh, every keystroke is a roundtrip" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47158864)) - Weak trust model: TOFU, no PKI (3 comments): "SSH is explicitly designed to allow unauthenticated users to do a whole lot of things" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46587737)) "It's bad enough that ssh does this by default with all your keys." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49593827)) "ssh has no PKI and is trivial to mitm during tofu" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49151021)) - Obscure behavior, hidden knowledge (3 comments): "The tricky bit is that much of the "secret menu" knowledge about ssh only lives in blog posts and random issue comments" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47333273)) "if you think your session is hanging and want to bail with ~., you have to press enter" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47333756)) "This is just an awfully designed feature, is all." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47422708)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Mosh](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mosh.md): 61 recommend - [Termius](https://hackerapproved.com/p/termius.md): 33 recommend - [Moshi SSH and Mosh terminal for iOS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/moshi.md): 16 recommend - [Echo SSH and mosh client for iOS](https://hackerapproved.com/p/echo-ios-ssh-and-mosh-client.md): 14 recommend - [JuiceSSH](https://hackerapproved.com/p/juicessh.md): 12 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "SSH", https://hackerapproved.com/p/ssh/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).