Hello everyone! I know that Linux GUI advanced in last few years but we still lack some good system configuration tools for advanced users or sysadmins. What utilities you miss on Linux? And is there any normal third party alternatives?
It seems impossible to set display scaling from the command line. Anything that fixes that would be nice.
What is your DE?
On KDE Plasma Wayland you can just use kscreen-doctor output.HDMI-A-1.scale.2 to set it to 200%
And it seem like CLI not GUI issue :)
Debian + GNOME. I’m extremely new to Linux so excuse my ignorance. I searched around the topic a while finding some commands that didn’t work and others having the same issue. If you know different that would be much appreciated!
If you are talking about fractional scaling it is not available (probably only available as an experimental setting on debian??). Otherwise, does this work https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI#GNOME ?
I have Emacs, and I have my NixOS configuration. That’s all the GUI system configuration I need.
I’m missing a lightweight (not like Thunderbird) contacts app, that can work with CardDAV and allow me to see, search and edit my contacts.
For me gnome apps are not “lightweight” and work fine only all together (Evolution + gnome-contacts + other gnome tools)
I generally don’t miss anything graphical, once I learn how to do something from the cli I rarely feel the need to do it graphically anymore as it’s usually a lot slower
The obvious one would be Photoshop and paint.net of course but krita does the trick
I maybe need to correct my post. I am talking about system utilities like Device Manager or something else.
Why would I want gui for those things? CLI is often a better interface. Being able to grep lsusb rather than scanning a gui for an entry is much better. It’s easier to pipe to an email as well. Screenshots don’t allow copy/paste…
As a newcomer to CLIs, GUI are great because you don’t need to know what you’re looking for. I can just open the devices window, and they’re all there, with most of the extra hardware stuff that’s not actually a real device already cleaned out.
To do the same with a CLI would take me 10 minutes of looking up what the hardware commands are, 5 minutes figuring out flags, and 30 minutes researching entries to see if they’re important. Even just a collapsible list would make that last step so much easier. And no, I can’t grep for what I need, because I don’t know what I need, I just know something in there is important with a vague idea of what it might look like.
Once I figure that all out for one thing, the best I can do is write that to a notes file so I don’t need to search so far next time, but there’s a good chance that I’ll need a different combination of commands next time anyway.
Not hating on CLIs, just wishing I could figure out how to use them faster.
One thing I kind of miss is autohotkeys on windows. It was relatively easy to do things like set keyboard keys to act as mouse keys. I did that once when I was getting over tendonitis.
These days I have a keyboard with mouse keys on it and a trackball also with mouse keys. I can use the middle button on the trackball and scroll with it, but I can’t use the middle button on the keyboard and scroll with the trackball, which would be more ergonomic for me. Haven’t figured that one out yet.
That said, I mostly don’t miss GUI stuff. I use a tiling window manager and command line utilities to do most things on my system. Its kind of primitive I guess, but the benefit is it works exactly the same on remote systems, headless servers, etc.
I have replaced autohotkeys with https://github.com/espanso/espanso
It does everything I need it to, although I am not sure if it can do the mouse button things you need
