Let the apologists have a field day in the comments.
Not entirely accurate since the majority of Linux system settings are in fact GUI settings, you forget the Linux under the hood is all pure text based meaning it’s just GUI settings and worse GUI settings.
Wait, do you argue that a terminal emulator is just another GUI but with a huge text box? 😅
If we want to be technical even the terminal itself is a GUI just not a very interactive one, technically anything(most things) outside of the grub loader, bios and drives are part of the gui, I will concede that that is not a very useful definition but when dealing with edge cases like terminal emulators you would have to say it is indeed part of the gui at least technically.
It’s called a terminal emulator because it emulates graphically what used to output to a printer at the console of a mainframe. Then you got CRT monitors. The mainframes like the PDP-10 would output to a printer or CRT monitor. This was your terminal. A printer writes the output from the mainframe 1 character at a time, left to right, top to bottom. The CRT monitors were made to do the same. Obviously before outputting to a printer or CRT monitor, the output would show on a set of lights on the console. If you watched them change enough, you would know where you were in your program as it ran (obviously something only doable because the opcodes were not running in parallel through super scalar pipelines in the Ghz). With printers and monitors, you could increase the amount of feedback you get from the running or exiting program and give input to the system via a keyboard.
So, the terminal is not “technically” a GUI. We do use a GUI to emulate a terminal which receives the actual terminal output from the system and then displays it for you. They are not the same thing at all. GUI is a paradigm for what you display on a Monitor for the user to interact with. Modern monitors are fast enough that they can and do work well with the GUI paradigm. You definitely wouldn’t be sending GUI context to a printer.
You get a gui?
The janky cobbled-together UIs straight out of 1994 are part of the charm!
All the settings changes should be config files. GUI is dumb Pooh.
What people expect:
✅Fix my box
❎Fuck my shit up
What we would get: System Kernel Interface
🔳 Regex Recursion
🔳 Kernel Language (Internal) [Dropdown: en-us, Dvorak, binary, Klingon, non-binary (Borg analog), Esperanto]
🔳 Ignore LPT on fire
🔳 Memory hole on sysctl
🔳 Mansplain man(8)
Yeah some people seem to have this expectation that there should just magically be a button to unbreak the PC. They talk about their personal pain points when using Linux as if there’s a conspiracy of devs to hide the unbreak buttons for the sake of elitism, but that… just isn’t a thing? If it was that easy to fix an issue, you probably wouldn’t need to fix it because the system would already come unbroken by default. I sympathize with everyone’s Bluetooth configuration woes but mostly it’s a pain in the ass because Bluetooth, in general, is a pain in the ass, not because of elitist devs (who I should mention are doing this in their free time for no pay. There’s almost no money in desktop Linux, unlike in servers).
