After installation, I survived about 10 minutes without a command line and the next thing I needed was their package manager’s manual (because that fancy GUI software shop simply killed itself)
No big deal for me. I feel safe on these paths. But IMHO “Linux without command line” is still only a dream.
In my firs time with linux I install ubuntu (maybe 12.04, I dont’t remember, it was gnome 2) in the only PC in my parents home, I delete windows, and we was using it 2 years without knowing what is a terminal and everything went fine, the problems appeard when I was discover the terminal hahahaha
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.
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.
I’ve tried to run Ubuntu, mint, Debian, and couple other distros without the terminal to see if I can actually recommend it to non-geeks. And every time, I conclude I can’t because the fucking “software center” (or whatever it’s called) is always garbage, and it’s easier to just use apt.
The only time I’ll recommend Linux to a non-tech person is when the hardware is so old that it would just be junked without Linux.
Not sure if Bauh is available for Debian and it’s derivatives, but it’s an amazing software center. If anything, use synaptic on Debian. It’s much better than any software center there.
Keep in mind, most people would be coming from windows where installing software is going to some website, hoping it isn’t a fake malware site, running their exe with admin privileges, and clicking next through a bunch of eulas until it finally is done. By comparison even the worst software centers are an improvement.
Using screenshots, demonstrate to me how the current edition of Linux Mint’s Software Manager application is “garbage” and show me how the Apple App Store, Google Play Store or the Windows Store is better.
I can agree that there are not great software managers out there, Pop!_Shop always felt like it was malfunctioning to me, and Synaptic Package Manager works but has some significant klunk, but…what’s wrong with Mint Software Manager that anyone else gets right.
Eh, you really can’t. Linux without the terminal only enables about 5% of the functionality available the user.
Linux geeks like to imagine a hypothetical “average user” who never needs to adjust settings or install anything beyond a web browser. But a person looking for that limited of functionality while also knowing how to install an operating system is not an average user.
I disagree. I’ve used KDE’s discover thingy to install stuff basically through dnf on fedora. It’s incredibly possible for the average user, who basically just browses the web and maybe writes documents.
You can use Linux without a terminal, but life is so much easier to just remember few letters (command) and pressing enter instead remembering 200 places where a setting is. You can also always just do sudo pacman --help.
Strong disagree lol but I understand your logic. I am a visual learner and it is a lot easier for me to understand what the structure and options are in a given program when I have a GUI.
To me the terminal feels like a scalpel. It’s a precise instrument, but only you need to know exactly what you’re slicing into.
My aunt is using Linux without terminal since 2016. Though she at least knows how to open terminal and paste commands when it’s necessary (needed a couple of times).
Same here. My Dad has been using Mint for years now, and wouldn’t know what to do in the command line. He gets on, does what he needs to do, and it just works for him.
Ιt depends on your competence. My mom’s laptop is Debian with XFCE (2 GB RAM old Chromebook converted to run Debian) and of course, she doesn’t use the terminal. But then again, she doesn’t even know how to open a new tab on Chrome. She just uses 1 tab at the time (which is why it’s enough with 2 GB of RAM). So she’s never going to see a terminal in her life, and it’s going to work just fine for her, since the only thing she does on a computer is load 1 tab on Chrome, and mostly use Facebook, or youtube, or news/recipe sites that I have put on her bookmark bar. When the computer needs to be updated, I do it for her once a month or so (using the terminal).
But if you’re trying to do a lot more than that, then maybe, sometimes, you will need to fix or change things using the terminal.
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 can’t personally, but I’ve installed/set up Linux systems for quite a lot of older people, and I think only one of them ever uses the terminal for anything. The rest just… use the computer.
On the whole, they’re pretty much just using Libreoffice, Firefox and a few other bits these days. If something needs the terminal to fix, we’re already past the point where they’ve phoned me to pop round and fix it.
These used to be Ubuntu systems, but I switched them all to Mint after having endless Snap permission problems with printers, USB sticks and other peripherals. Once up and running, it’s pretty low maintenance.
I guess they don’t need to use the terminal, because I’ll go and do it if it’s necessary - but we are looking at once every few years. Not a lot of tech support needed.
On my own machine, I probably use the terminal every day.
Interestingly enough, Xfce4 has a kiosk mode. You could build a custom desktop for them and restrict changes. You then could do mass updates with Ansible or Saltstack
It’s a good plan for a more professional setup, but in this distinctly unprofessional setup, if I did it remotely, I wouldn’t get my chat and a cup of tea and biscuit :)
Yes, I do it every day, on my Android phone, router, printer, television, speakers, smart hub, smartwatch, cable box, car, and everything else running Linux underhood.
Add comment