A screenshot from Back To The Future. Doc has Marty and his girlfriend in the car, and is saying “GUI? Where we’re going, we don’t need GUI!”
Every few years I buy a new computer and then install a fresh copy of whatever UI friendly distro that the community is gushing over. Each time has seen significant improvements but each time I’m spending my time in the terminal.
I’m not even a normie. I run Synology with docker containers. I operate my own website. I just don’t wanna be in the terminal just to play my PC games.
I think the problem is that it’s just easier to explain what to do for someone having a problem by telling them to paste a line of text into the terminal. Having to walk a user through gui navigation is a pain.
That means, though, that anyone getting help to get gud at Linux is going to mostly be leaning terminal commands.
Quite the opposite. Walking people through terminal commands is a pain. Cryptic commands that often obscure their true meaning and functionality, where every typo leads to failure.
On the other hand, asking someone to open “Software” and just click on the “Install” button of whatever they searched for is infinitely better than explaining how to update the package index, add a repo and so forth.
And that’s just installing software.
New kernel? The average user shouldn’t know about that. Just install it with an OS upgrade. File editing? Stop opening explanations with “sudo nano…”, start with “open your favourite text editor”. Or better: " click on settings and activate option xyz." And so forth.
I use the terminal myself. Sometimes because I want to. Often because I have to. I wish I had the option more often.
But the opposite is true when you’re by yourself. If you’re staring at the terminal, literally infinite commands are possible. If you’ve got a GUI, the designers had to spend a little time thinking about what all the operations in the program were, and how to organize and access them. You, the user, then get to navigate this mini-help-guide that is the GUI in order to figure out what you need to do. Yes, it’s more work for the programmer, but that’s the entire point of programming. Do a little more work up front in order to save yourself and others a lot of work down the road.
This guy gets it.
I just spent 5 days with full ADHD hyper focused trying to install Standard Notes on my Synology. Even with the help of forums and ChatGPT I can’t get it to work.
I think the last time I tried a Linux distro, I couldn’t get my gaming steering wheel to work properly and spent 3 days also failing.
