The short answer is yes. But the interesting part - and I’m talking from personal experience - is that from the moment you realize just how easy and powerful using the console is, you learn how to use it.
And it does not mean you are going to turn into a full on expert or geek, tinkering around the console. You just learn a few simple commands that enable you to do something (or somethings) quicker, easier and cleaner than going through a GUI.
For many people it’s not quicker or easier. If they’ve not used CLI before, they’d need to learn multiple new things. Going to a Web browser for help every time, before doing something is not quick. Memorising precise command strings that mean nothing to the user, is not easy for many either. For them it’s bad usability.
And even if you did manage to do something 2 years ago, you can’t remember how to do it today. Do you really want up go down that same rabbit hole again? Spending 5 minutes reading stuff and running a single command takes a lot more time than 15 mouse clicks.
I’ve always thought GUIs felt more like doing things by hand and CLIs felt more like having the computer do it for you. Like if you want to do some complicated task that requires multiple programs and lots of menus using a GUI, it’s easy the first time, but once you need to do it a second time you have to do it all over again by hand. But if you do it from the command line, while it might be harder the first time, subsequent times are zero effort because you can just run the exact same commands again from your history or combine them into one or a script to make it even easier.
That it is. In GUI, you’re working for the computer to achieve your goals. At the CLI, you invest time teaching the computer what you want done, and it works for you.
Agreed. I’m not super computer geeky compared to this website. A bunch of people here would probably not even consider me techy.
That said, I hated the command line and would actively avoid it as often as possible. Once I started using it (just to paste code from tutorials) and then later to cd into folders so I can run an old game .exe with WINE, and then to straight up command line tools for converting .bin and .cue files into workable ISOs (also for old games), I started seeing with the command line is so sick.
I’m converted. It’s great. It’s not as spooky as it looks. Make the background 50% transparent.
Heck yeah I would love to never use the terminal. The terminal is the biggest roadblock for me adopting Linux. I never, ever want to open it. If I have to open it, Linux has failed for me as a windows replacement.
I want to try Linux again, and I have dipped my toes many times, but the terminal is the major block for me, a slightly above average pc user.
Good question. Should be. Stuff as seemingly simple as converting a couple dozen text documents to pdf requires it if you don’t want to sit around for an hour, clicking away. Many such examples.
I honestly don’t quite remember. I heard it from someone who was doing government work at the time. I think it had to do with security issues with rancher.
But you quickly learn for somethings. The terminal is just easier.
If you ignore odd stuff. Most everyday stuff to maintain the system is available in a controlled panal like program. It varies based on distribution and windows manager. But the basic setup is there for most things.
Its when you want to do something creative it gets more complex. While most commands have gui apps. Most online guidance will just find the terminal an easy way to guide you.
Even basic things in distros are quite different, for example the frontend for settings, so tech support threads will show how to do it in the backend. Oh well, but then there’s someone who suggests
If you’re a noob, run this and get a “nano: command not found” error, you’ll google it and learn to resolve it using apt. However, Manjaro’s package manager is pacman but you don’t know, so you install apt using a weird guide without knowing what it even is. The next update then wreaks havoc on your system.
My first install ended in a dependency hell because of this.
That’s probably for the best. If Manjaro was a little more honest and straight forward I wouldn’t have an issue. The problem is that they say they are kind ignorant of there mistakes.
Honestly they could ask for help and the community would step up.
This whole threat is a HUGE circle jerk and a collection of all the “I USE ARCH BTW” variations imaginable.
“WHY WOULDN’T ALL PEOPLE WANT THE KNOWLEDGE TO CRAFT COMMANDS TO MANIPULATE, FILTER AND SEARCH TEXT IN A WHOLE FILE SYSTEM WITH JUST ONE COMMAND? UNCULTURED PESANTS”
Come, not everyone is a computer nerd, nor everyone ones to optimize 30s in the workflow if it means memorizing a bunch of commands, their syntax and options.
If you want to use Linux without the terminal nowadays it’s pretty easy. But also I think the fear of the terminal is part of the culture that consumer electronics have cultivated where people don’t know (or want to know) how their systems work.
If you take the time to use it, not only can you save yourself time, but also learn a lot more about how you can fix things when they go wrong! That kind of knowledge gives you so much more ownership of your system, because you don’t have to rely on your manufacturer to solve problems for you.
Same for Mac and Windows too, the terminal is something that shouldn’t be necessary, but when it is it helps to know what you’re doing. :)
I think not everyone needs to know how their device works. Specialization is what advances us as humans after all. If they wanted to know, good for them, and if they don’t also good for them. If I were using a car, I don’t need to know how the engine convert a chemical energy, transfer power, and generate thrust
Edit just to give an example, an office worker may only need to use a word processor and their OS be up to date. If the user can just click the GUI to update the OS rather than typing the command for whatever package manager the OS uses, it is good enough for him. Sysadmin can give them the instruction once and done.
If the user forgot the instruction, they can explore it on their own with GUI without internet since no matter how deep a GUI config is, then there must be a way to get there (assuming the UI designer isn’t shit). Contrast that with CLI where if you forgot or don’t know any command there is little help or indicator of what’s available and what can be done without external help.
I could not agree more. The number of people in here who are demanding that everyone who uses an OS understand it completely is absolutely ridiculous. I’d love to sit down and watch these people rebuild a lawnmower engine or service the compressor on their refrigerator. Hell, a shocking number of people I meet don’t know how to cook for themselves and they’re going to demand that end users be able to chroot and save a nonbootable system? Get out of here.
It’s pretty unreasonable to expect people to know all the intricacies of their OS unless it’s their job, but I do think people could stand to treat their computer less like an unknowable magic box when they need to work with it and take a few minutes to try any basic troubleshooting at all. An example of the sort of thing I’m talking about, last year, my fan stopped working nearly as well and began making crazy amounts of noise. Could I explain to you how the motor in my fan works? Absolutely not. But I unplugged it, looked up how to disassemble it and got out my screwdrivers and opened it up to see if there was anything that I could see wrong with it. Turns out there was a lot of hair wrapped around a shaft and the base of the blades that built up over the years I’ve had it, and removing that and reassembling it was all it took to get it working fine again.
Plenty of people don’t want to put in even that small amount of time and effort to understand things when it comes to computers, which is also a valid choice of its own, but they tend to annoy me when they attribute being unable to do something to the system being too complicated to understand/use, rather than owning their decision to focus their time and energy elsewhere. There are absolutely complex programs that are not accessible for non-tech people on Linux or the BSDs, but the same could be said for Windows and Mac. In the case of the other two, people just choose the option that works for them, but with Linux, they decide ahead of time that Linux is tough and complicated and don’t even try. It could be something as simple as they want to install Debian and need non-free firmware to use their wireless card, there are people who will declare this to complicated to understand and discard the idea of using an OS entirely over a question that can be resolved in less than 5 minutes with a quick search and nano, all because “Oh, I’m not a computer person, it says terminal.”
Yeah, you do make a good point about misattributing the system being incapable to their lack of research. But people don’t like it when they are wrong/corrected most of the time. It also applies everywhere, computers just so happen to be the most prominent. The point is that people will complain about anything anywhere.
You bring up an example of installing Debian and needing non-free firmware for their wireless card. Take a step back and think how many people are even aware about the term non-free? It is quite a ubiquitous english word with different meanings in the open source community. People reading it will assume they know what it means.
The scenario when someone that is fed up with windows and decides to install debian will see the word “non-free” and attribute it to “you must pay” at glance. If the resource they used to install it mentions and clarify what non-free means, good. Otherwise, it can be a boogeyman for them and make them re-think their decision to switch.
Contrast that with CLI where if you forgot or don’t know any command there is little help or indicator of what’s available and what can be done without external help.
And how does the user suppose to know to type man? He may remember the instructions to check man, but he may not. For us, those 3 letter words are very familiar, but others need time to remember them. On GUI, this is no problem because as I stated they will bound to find it by exploring. Basically point and click adventure games I guess rather than the guessing game. And users will choose the path they most familiar first.
Bigger problem, even if they know about MAN pages, remembering what their looking for is hard. You can’t type ‘man dnf’ if you don’t remember what your package manager is called.
Yeah good point. Navigation can be unintuitive too. Like, how do you quit? Is it q? Ctrl+C? What even is the weird symbol before C? Those are some of the hurdles that must be overcome when coming to CLI and not necessarily easy to remember. Sure you can do it in 1 hour, but say tomorrow would you remember it again? What if the system is running smoothly for 1 month and you never opened the terminal again after those 1 hour?
Do you know how everything in your house works? How to repair everything? No right?
Would you be brave enough to mess with the grounding of your house, or the AC or the heaters, the washing machine, the doors? Not eveyone wants mess with every (subsystem) thing in their house/live"
Most of the people I know want their PC to work and if somwthing goes wrong they just send it to repair or ask somebody else to fix it, they don’t wanna do it themselves, which I find normal, they have little to no interesting in PCs, and that is compleatly fine.
And before someone says "Yeah, but the computer won’t kill you if you fuck up the fixing or messing, let me tell you, a “sudo rm -r” or “sudo chown -R” can fuck you system BAR, making you loose important data and info.
-…But refugee -I hear you about to type-, they SHOULD have 10921 back-ups in atleast 2542 independent locations. Yo, they don’t wanna even see the terminal, and you want them to interest themselves for data integrity and redundacy? Come on.
I didn’t say you have to know everything, just like I don’t know everything in my house and how it works, but I do know how to do basic repairs so I don’t pay loads of money for a guy to come and unclog a drain. I know how to reset my circuit breakers, how to change a fuse, how to change a lightbulb.
That’s what the terminal is. No one here is telling you to write a bootloader in assembly or meticulously study kernel environment parameters. No one advocating for basic knowledge of a terminal likely has knowledge on subnet masks, compilers, or other low level systems that a modern Linux abstracts for you.
But! I know how to update my packages from a terminal. I know how to install a package outside of a repository, or one that’s not listed on my graphical package manager. I know how to export an environment variable to get my software to work how it should.
That’s what “knowing the terminal” gives you. It’s a basic skill that unlocks you from being a mere “user” of a system to an owner of a system. I don’t think everyone will ever need the terminal, but there are people who are replying to me that seem to have a genuine fear that people have knowledge of their computers in a meaningful way.
Knowledge is autonomy for whatever you do, and there’s a reason why the most profitable of systems are the very systems that are locked down abstracted and “user friendly” in all ways that harm a user’s rights and freedoms.
I’ll coincide with you in that first-aid-quick-repairs is something people should in the best of cases know how to do, but setting a envirental variable or installing a package is not a “simple thing”. I’ve worked with engineers that programmed math models for a living that had no idea what a enviromental varible even was. Yes is easy to do, but the concept behind it, what it is, what it does and why are not simple, without the right background or the will to learn about the topic.
And, about user and owner. Sure, I get your point and personally I share it. But again, that is an opinion, tell a non-interested-user that they don’t really own their rig until they know how to use the terminal and I assure you that most of them will disagree.
Edit cause I wrongly posted before finishing: Comparing uncloging -manually pushing and pull a bar- or chaning a light -turn left, change, then right- or a breaker -literally just pulling a tab up- are WAY simpler actions. Yes, running apt upgrade is easy, but how you know is all well? That it work? + if I run apt update everyday I see almost no diference in my system, why should I even do something like that
I think this is the bigger issue, to be honest. Like your example of environmental variables, it’s not a complicated concept, but when a guide says to set the variable for Editor rather than a context menu asking you to choose the default program to open this type of file in the future, all of a sudden, people lose their minds about how complicated it is.
Comparing uncloging -manually pushing and pull a bar- or chaning a light -turn left, change, then right- or a breaker -literally just pulling a tab up- are WAY simpler actions. Yes, running apt upgrade is easy, but how you know is all well? That it work? + if I run apt update everyday I see almost no diference in my system, why should I even do something like that
These examples don’t make sense to me as a point against using the terminal, especially since GUI package managers are a thing these days. Many upgrades are under the hood, so to speak, and don’t produce visible changes for most users, and this applies just as much to other operating systems as it does to Linux. When Windows finishes upgrading and reboots, or Chrome tells a user updates are available, and they restart it, how do they know all is good? For the most part, they take it as a given that all is good as long as there’s no new, undesired behavior that starts after the upgrade.
Just because I haven’t been exploited by a security vulnerability or encountered a particular bug is no reason to remain on a version of my OS or programs that is still liable to either of them. That’s just a bizarre argument against staying up to date.
Not to be adversarial, but Yes, I know how everything works in my house and how to fix it, or maintain it. Same as my car, or PC. i just see it as understanding the fundamentals of the world we access.
There is a large degree of willful ignorance. Its 2024 and the degree of computer illiteracy is astounding.
I was an 80s kid but even I grew up with computers: Atari, Commodore and Amstrad. I then learnt PCs with DOS. All pretty much self learnt from 8 years old as no one else in my family knew shit about computers so I was on my own.
These days computers are so user friendly ad practically run themselves, even Linux but the amount of people who cant perform basic computer tasks even in Windows is unbelievable. Do they even still teach computers at schools anymore?
I have a theory that the crowd of people who learned computers or iPads etc from GUIs only, they have a harder time with terminal. Those who used DOS a lot find it to be a happy space.
I’m not saying they can’t overcome it or that it is universal. It’s just a theory I have based on early observations.
Now, it does make sense that a GUI only person would have to play catch up compared to a person the same age who has a decade of exposure to using a terminal if they’re going to code in a terminal. It’s just different mindsets and workflows.
At my work the younger coders who say they prefer GUI coding (and are terminal avoidant) seem to have more trouble and their debugging methods have many more steps and take longer. Many times they run everything in Jupyter notebooks and avoid running the processes in terminal at all. This is a problem if they put off end to end testing until the very last moment instead of testing incrementally.
Also, for context, this is to create production level Python code which is to be deployed on a terminal only server.
I’d want to make a measurable experiment with a larger sample size to confirm this theory though, as the systems are complex enough there are many possible reasons for these patterns. I’m just very aware these days of that moment of hesitance, like a deer in headlights, when some people have to open the terminal to solve their problem.
I don’t think it’s a theory rather than an objective fact. A lot of “traditional” computer skills have almost totally gone extinct because consumer devices are designed to hide as many system features from you as possible.
The saving grace is that even being raised without it, you end up needing these skills to become a developer of any decent calibre. That gives at least some route for these skills to transfer to new generations.
It has always just felt a lot faster than navigating through a GUI. I suppose at the end of the day this is entirely dependant on how well designed the GUI is. Should I type in one command I have memorized or navigate through multiple sub pages?
Simple example: installing stuff. Much faster and simpler to type “install foo” in cli than open a gui, searching for it, finding the right one, clicking install.
Same for updating: it takes me 2s to type the command to update all packages, that’s less than the time I need to move my mouse to the icon of the package manager.
Sorry, but that doesn’t really work. I can expand your terminal answer as much as you did the gui one. You have to open the terminal, use the man page for apt to find out how to search for a packages name, search for a package and hopefully find it, then you need to run another command with that package name to install it.
Meanwhile, I can shorten the gui example to “It take me two seconds to use the search bar and click install”
They all have their ups and downs, guis are just easier and more intuitive for people who don’t live and breath terminal commands. Terminals can be extremely confusing for them, having never used one before.
There is a bit of bias in your assumptions as illustrated by the “use the man page” step.
It is not always true that GUI means easier or more intuitive. It almost never means faster which is why terminal people like the CLI so much.
One of the major benefits of the command line is that it is almost universal between distros. Package management is one of the few things that differs between distros so let’s use that as an example as even in this case there are only a handful of package systems across dozens of distros.
I know that apt install and apt search work across the entire Debian family including Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, and Pop ( all different GUIs ). If I was at a random Linux command line in any distro, it would take me moments to try apt, dnf, pacman, and zypper. Without even knowing what distro I was looking at, I could be managing packages in 10 seconds. I bet one of these would work on your machine. The commands that did not work would be harmless. In contrast, it would take me at least that long to find the “store” in a menu ( if I even knew how to bring up the menu ). There are almost as many software stores as distros. Some distros have more than one. Once in the store, I would have to discover how to do what I want. I have never used most of them. In half of them, finding out how to do a full upgrade may take a while and I am not sure how confident I would be that it was going to do what I wanted. I may really be lost if I got any errors.
I use an old MacBook every day and booting into Xfce I can type “yay -Syu” before the wallpaper even comes up and certainly before a store would launch. I can also ssh into a number of other machines and update their packages remotely with the same command. Getting a Remote Desktop would be far harder and what methods are available to do that vary from machine to machine. It would be far harder.
Anyway, this comment is way too long. My point is that, for many people, the command line is faster, easier, perhaps more intuitive, more consistent, and often requires less to remember than the GUI. Windows just added a “sudo” command. Why would they need to do that if they are the poster child “everything in the GUI” OS?
It is great to have GUI options and clearly some people will did that less intimidating. That said, once you start using the CLI, it is painful to go back.
I think we will have to agree to disagree. Figuring out the software store guis is so incredibly easy. Install button installs, search box searches. They are all the same. Dont need to know what an update button is doing, because average people wouldn’t even know what is happening while doing it via terminal anyways.
Searching is also 100x times easier in the guis. You dont have a million other packages match your search (ever try apt search chrome?)
Though you are right, I had some bias with the man page bit. Average users wouldn’t even know what man is, making it even harder for them. They would have to open a web browser, describe what they want to do somehow, and hope a copy pasted command does what they want.
However once you’re up to speed with CLI, it becomes much simpler and faster. While a GUI will still be more steps even after you become expert at using that GUI.
The flaw is in the question: terminal apps practically always include more functionality especially for batch processing and automation of tasks.
I’ll give an example: Find me a GUI application that can quickly convert a gigabyte of .doc files into .pdf format. Pandoc can do that with a single command.
Also: You’re probably comparing the process of “using” a GUI app with “using” a terminal app, in other words, if you spend 8 hours sitting in front of Premiere or KDENLIVE clicking a mouse, you expect to do the same job with ffmpeg by sitting in front of it for 8 hours typing commands, right? But that’s not how it’s designed to work; it’s designed for you to write scripts that do the things you commonly do, which takes time to do once, then you run those scripts, maybe even from the GUI.
I’ll give a real example: the software I use for my personal journal is called RedNotebook. This stores the data in a human readable markup format (I think it’s YAML?) and displays it in rich text, including the ability to display inline pictures. I like putting pictures in my journal.
First problem: what it actually does is store a relative path to the location of the picture in your file system; if ever I was to change the location in my file system where I store the journal or my pictures, or change operating systems, this would break. So I created a Pictures folder within the Journal folder to copy all pictures there.
Second problem: My phone takes 12MP or larger pictures and the journal displays them at full scale so they take up the whole screen. I’d like to shrink them.
Third problem: The app’s “Insert picture” funcionality opens a file browser window written in QT which is different than the one from most of my GTK-based desktop apps use and I’d have to manually find the file.
Simultaneous solution: I wrote a short bash script that calls ImageMagick to shrink the image among a few other cleanup details, and builds the appropriate string to paste into my journal and puts that string in the primary buffer. I then wrote a Nemo Action so that the option to run this script appears in the context menu iff I right click on exactly one image file. Now I can add an image to my journal by browsing to its location in my file manager, right clicking, clicking Add To Journal, and then middle clicking in RedNotebook where I want to paste the picture.
There are hundreds of tedious little things I would do over and over again clicking through endless menus, windows and dialogs that I can script away, like paving my own bypass lane.
You may be out of touch with people that are used to GUI. For example, during the first installation of linux distro after the user is landed on their DE, as far as I know, no distro ever curates the terminal to them. Like “this is the menu”, “this is the terminal emulator”, and even after the user managed to open the terminal, it is not obvious what to do next as there is only text prompt. Remember, users using GUI usually encounter text prompts with some hint (username, comment, email). Meanwhile the terminal has nothing. Suddenly you see the user you are logged in as and a blinking cursor. After that, how do you know what apps are installed? What commands can you call? Typing help doesn’t always help on every distro. Again, remember, users using GUI will see what apps are installed usually using a menu of some sort. There is a lot of friction coming from GUI if you have never encountered CLI before. Heck, I bet some people have never installed an application outside from an app store or their commissioned device. Even a file explorer concept is foreign to some.
Most people on this planet simply do not care. They don’t want to learn terminal and you cannot change their minds. But they still need a desktop OS that works, so we have to give it to them unless you want everyone to stay on Windows forever.
Microsoft is one of if not the biggest and richest companies in the world and they got that way on a strategy based on the public’s fear and hatred of reading comprehension.
The author argues that you don’t need to use the terminal but constantly argues that you should. The average computer user doesn’t even know which version of Windows they’re using. Many don’t even know if they’re using Windows or Mac. Until Linux gets over the obsession with the terminal we’re never going to have the year of Linux.
You know not everyone likes to read a wall of text. Some people prefer watching a video than reading an article. So some people just like to use GUI than CLI, and that’s fine.
The problem with the cli is you need to memorize a whole bunch of new words and syntax in order to do anything. You also need to memorize what not to do so you don’t accidentally erase your system while using rm or cp or whatever.
Even something as simple as copying and pasting, which works the same in every single other program has new rules in the terminal. I mean, think about that. If you’re just learning bash, then the first thing you’ll be doing is copy pasting commands. But even that has the hurdle of 'oh, I guess this is the one program where ctrl-c means something else
Like, how do you look at sudo, cat, man, and apt, and think ‘yeah that’s intuitive’. And forget about multitasking, new users won’t even know how to quit most programs (is it ctrl-q? Just q? Esc? Ctrl-c? Ctrl-d? Wait how do I undo that, is it ctrl-z? Wait where did the thing go
If you want a non-terminal os based on linux you just have to make something like android or chromeos or steamdeckos.
Those are and pretty popular, so I don't know who can claim linux is "terminal obsessed" it's just a kernel and there is a wide diversity of os based on it.
Debian , fedora , suse etc might all be "obsessed" with the terminal.
For me that's just the obvious economical way to offer features. decent GUI costs a lot more to develop and document - so you have to have less features for a given amount of dev time. Or you have google /valve/microsoft type amounts of resources to spend.
I always thought this "year of linux" thing was a meme to make fun of canonical or idiotic tech journalists .
Is anyone realitsitcally interested in volunteering their time to win over legions of Microsoft fanboys. Fuck me sounds like hell.
And frankly the use of terminal is going to be far from the first blocker to linux adoption for those who don't even know they're using windows or mac.
I disagree. Many people like to have control over there computer even if they don’t want to learn a bunch of new skills.
Linux isn’t for everyone but its gotten to the point where someone could figure it out if they so choose. It no longer is the unstable mess it was 10-20 years ago.
I think tools like YaST help to save time, instead of editing the bootloader in config files, you can simply enter, search for “Boot Loader” and edit there, be following a tutorial or official documentation. I sometimes prefer to use YaST just so I don’t do things wrong. it’s like the old Control Panel in Windows.
I am a gui only user. AMA. I have to use command line occasionally but it’s less than once a month, if that. Im on EndeavourOS desktop for over 2 years with Bauh managing updates. My home server runs Unraid with a web GUI interface maybe used CLI twice in 5 years? They told me Linux could be what I wanted it to be. I don’t want to use command line, so I don’t!
I find the documentation to be very good for Arch based distros. The EOS forums or Archlinux.org wiki almost always has what I need. Otherwise the github page usually has Arch install directions that are very clear. The major things I’ve had to do in terminal is just initial set up of applications, enabling things to run on startup or changing configs. For example, and this is the most complicated example I can think of. I use grub-btrfs to put my Timeshift snapshots into the grub menu. All I really had to do was 3 commands:
sudo systemctl start grub-btrfsd
sudo systemctl enable grub-btrfsd
sudo systemctl edit --full grub-btrfsd
The first two commands start the daemon and set it to run on start up, the 3rd command is editing the config so I could use Timeshift over Snapper. Again this is the most complicated example I can think of and its 3 lines. Not only that but I was able to find documentation on two different sites. In under a minute of googling.
For me, the terminal is something I’ll learn once I’m more familiar with which apps I like. Until then, it’s nice to have something like pamac to help me find the thing I need.
So many comments here saying you don’t need the terminal for full functionality… What Distro are you people using??? How do you install programs not in the “software center” and how do you edit config files? How do you configure a network share? I don’t really think you guys are thinking this through.
For any use-cases beyond a very limited chromebook-like functionality, Linux is absolutely not fully usable without access to the terminal.
Well if i double-click a file I’ve made executable, it will ask if I’d like to run it, and most software will have a github or downloads page that will give you direct downloads to the software.
In other words, I can successfully install things like a windows user, I just have to go the extra step to open the file’s properties and make it executable with the GUI first.
Apt is faster, and it’s also faster to do a direct download, make it executable, then execute it in the terminal, too. But I CAN do it.
Config files can be edited in the GUI text editor, it’s just slower.
To test my claim and prove your third point, this link is the repository for a samba GUI, found at www.samba.org/samba/GUI/. Specifically, it’s SMB4K, the first one.
Convenient? No. Would it update automatically? No. Do I want to do it this way, or recommend it? Still no. But it does function.
In other words, I can successfully install things like a windows user, I just have to go the extra step to open the file’s properties and make it executable with the GUI first.
Some programs can be installed this way, but it’s extremely far from universal.
Config files can be edited in the GUI text editor
Not without opening them as root, which in every distro I know of, requires the terminal.
To test my claim and prove your third point, this link is the repository for a samba GUI
In mint I can right click in a folder and reopen the folder with elevated privileges. That’s my primary, I assumed it was standard but if it’s not common I guess it’s a cinnamon thing. If so, maybe cinnamon is the desktop of choice for avoiding the terminal.
I didn’t do my full diligence to the samba GUI thing, apparently. That’s a good catch.
To salvage my argument, yumex has a GUI and extends yum, so while the instructions expect the terminal, I think it’ll be optional.
I still recommend it to nobody, but someone who set out to avoid the terminal doesn’t have to fail.
yumex, pip-gui, and aptitude give yum, pip, and apt GUI’s, respectively, so most anything that expected the terminal should be doable without it. All it costs is a bunch of effort troubleshooting GUI things or finding out one doesn’t display error messages and logs them weirdly or whatever.
Pretty sure you can configure “open as root” in some file managers. Also you can configure a gksudo (or similar) setup.
Really though, that makes me think. The file manager should detect you’re opening something you don’t have write access to and ask if you want to authenticate as root to open it.
Just double clicking on /etc/fstab opens it in the editor, I can write whatever I want and when I want to save it asks for authentication.
Anyways, what exactly do you think is the average user that can and should play around in system config files and can’t use the terminal at the same time?
The normal people doesn’t install software external to the store or configure the system a lot, in IOS you can’t do this things and everyone is fine. For share network in gnome you can do it with a button in the WiFi settings
If snap or flathub repos are in the store, any mainstream application be in. In the other side, if you don’t know what are you doing and install random packages, the most probably is that you’ll broke your system
I spend a lot of time arguing against Manjaro. That said, Manjaro comes with a GUI package manager that provides access to the AUR.
What software are you using that is not available in the Manjaro repos or AUR? My guess is that the majority of people would never need to install anything more.
I think it is actually quite likely that most people never need more than what is in the Ubuntu repos. However, I am not as confident to stand behind that claim.
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