You must log in or # to comment.
The problem I have is that the GUI tools are very specific to distros, dms, and releases. It’s a problem that arises from having so many choices.
CLI tools work long after they’re deprecated and very often cross distros.
Something as simple as getting your IP address can be in diferent areas, the settings->network panel isn’t even a safe bet. A lot of distros are now putting a network or wifi icon in your tray, but it doesn’t always look the same, can be hidden, isn’t in the same place.
Ifconfig and ip work on everything and can be installed on almost, if not every, platform.
If you do a web search for how to find your local network address in linux using the GUI, you’re given a choice of a bunch of different places to look and the reccomendations don’t line up word-for-word with what the current menus in KDE->settings look like. What’s more interesting is when I go into kde-settings and do manages to find Wi-Fi and internet instead of network connections, it doesn’t give me my ip, it’s all just blank.
Simple things can work well in GUI.
Now, working on a GUI that tries to expose every little features? No thank you. I would not want to develop it, and I would not want to have to use it.
It’s ok to go install a software through discover instead of using the CLI.
It’s unlikely I will use your “accessible” GUI tools, but I applaud you for making them, even if they’re shit. It’s like art, the more art there is, the better the world is, even if I personally can’t appreciate some of it, I acknowledge the greatness if it’s existence.
“I’m having an issue with Windows”
"Please open
CMD.EXEand runsfc /scannowandDISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth
If that doesn’t solve your issue, you need to reinstall Windows
Hope that helps!I cant think of a time that sfc scannow or dsim cleanup has ever fixed a problem
If you actively edit/delete some system files non-essential for boot, but that would break some integrated features, sure. But random corruption of protected system files? If that happens, you’re not fixing anything without changing your storage and/or the rest of the hardware anyway.
It worked for me on an issue once. Which, tbh, is worse than it never working, because it gave me hope and a reason to keep trying it in the future.
I have had DISM work a handful of times for work. SFC has never fixed anything.
Same.
I reinstall my windows partition every like year.
You forgot to start with shutdown /g
Hope that helps.
no chkdsk?
I think we should just add a button on the desktop that runs both of those.
We’ll call it… “New All”?
ffmpeg is great, and doing simple things is pretty straightforward, but if you work with a lot of media and do different kinds of operations, give Shutter Encoder a shot, it’s an amazing FOSS GUI tool for ffmpeg, yt-dlp, and more!
ffmpeg ❌
ffmpreg ✔️
Interesting. Their website would make me run away fearing it’s from a cheap fake download button scam from ten years ago, but the software itself looks pretty legit.
From the comments I fail to understand why it has to be one thing or the other.
I want both. Not only that, I would love GUI tools that show the CLI commands for doing the same thing in real time, so I would learn them with examples of things I actually want to do.
It doesn’t have to be one or the other. It’s just a rhetoric that was jokingly pushed on back when communication wasn’t worldwide, immediate, and lacking context. It has now been repeated ad-nauseam by people that have no idea of why it was said in the first place.
Some GUI tools are efficient. Some CLI tools are efficient. Sometimes, both are efficient. It depends on the tool AND the task at hand. Unless you’re taking internet memes at heart, then use whatever.
Well, to be honest, I do sometimes mock (in a friendly manner) some coworker that are using GUI almost exclusively. The only reason I do that is because the exact same task could be accomplished in a fraction of the time with minimal CLI knowledge. But even then, it gets the job done.
I’ve been saying this for a while now. A good gui doubles as documentation.
“Join our Discord server!”
I think this is a space where the decline of online search is very apparent. This is really a challenge of finding the right information: e.g. finding the right wiki page or, more often than not, some one else explaining the practical use of what the wiki says in a way that you as a user can understand.
My favorite part of Linux troubleshooting is you get to enter all these command line commands that barely make sense and in the end nothing works because they’re meant for glibktw-6.32ajqx_rc4.1 but in the three weeks since that obscure forum post was made, every distro moved to glibktw-6.32ajqx_mgtk+2 and nothing works anymore.
Nah
- CLI is relatively consistent, UIs keep changing; documentation on how to do X will be outdated extremely quickly and unlike CLI those changes aren’t documented nor searchable
- GUIs are straight up not documented, you can’t know an option exists unless you stumble on it
- Even if the GUI is explicit enough to count as documentation, you can’t search a GUI; the CLI documention can be searched for keywords
- You can’t automate GUIs if the need arises
I’m not against GUIs in general, but they should always be supplementary to CLI, otherwise you end up with windows
☝️ This guy operates systems.
otherwise you end up with windows
Windows without the garbage? I’m okay with that.
To do this setting, you have to open up regedit, and…
That part of Windows isn’t so pretty. A quick copy-paste of a CLI is so much better than opening up regedit. Powershell has improved this, but for a long time this was the approach for settings microsoft couldn’t be bothered to make intuitive UI for.
No, Windows as in “this setting is hidden under this menu, that submenu, here click to open another sub-window…”. This will happen any time a dev tries to arrange settings in logical way (instead of flat list of toggle and input boxes), because “logically belong together” and “actually often used together or one after another” are not the same, and also dev logic, internal system logic and user logic are also three different things. Result - mad maze
Which is why many tinkerers like CLI - at least one can run
man somethingorsomething --helpin most casesYeah, man is clutch… I wonder if people would be so intimidated by CLI if everyone knew how easy it was to learn commands with man
A lot of people are afraid of text. Like, they see text on a screen and get visibly scared. Weirdest shit ever.
I get what you meant, I was just making a little joke, though I feel like there’s a huge difference between shitty ui that can’t be bypassed and reasonable ui that still can’t be bypassed. The latter is usually managable and tolerable.
I personally prefer having both options but in general I go with a UI.
I feel like a dinosaur at work because many times I have no idea how to use the different programs there, mostly because everything is so incoherent (to me).
And I don’t mean a large living dinosaur cracking trees in two while chasing my dinner.
I mean a bunch of sad brown bones held up by sticks in a dusty museum everyone walks by.
Look honey , it’s the HugeNerdosaurus
So? I want to see the T rex!
You can’t copy and paste into a GUI, and it’s painful to help people to use them.
Or pipe GUI output into another GUI function.
Or
log.txtbasic_task_list = ['copy and paste', 'install package', 'type', 'keyboard', 'read and write' ] for basic_task in basic_task_list: print(f""" Newbies can't {basic_task}. They never {basic_task} in windows. Windows has replaced {basic_task} with copilot, this is what linux needs to do to compete. How will linux ever hope to attract windows user if it still maintains this ancient hacker 1337xor tools like {basic_task}? Users just want to turn on computer and watch it do computance - how does linux not get this? """)What’s easier to support?
"Ok, open app commandX,
now click on the button labeled Y… It’s just there, just below your mouse cur… oh now you’ve moved your mouse… no, not there, it’s more to the left, up a bit… down a bit, it’s labeled Y. Third one from the top.
Yes, that’s the one, now click it.
ok, in this pop up you type "super secret code thing’,
no, capitalization doesn’t matter.
Yes. I’ll spell it “s u p e r {space} s e c r e t {space} c o” what do you mean, you don’t have a T on your keyboard? "Or. “Open up the terminal and type this code: commandX --CodeY This will do XYZ. After it’s done, can you tell me the error it says on the screen?”
But yes, I agree, the GUI looks nicer.
I dgaf about support. (i’m naturally perky).
Back in dos there was a systemic encouragement to users to at least learn something about a computer. Nowadays windows apologists seem to relish how much it dumbs down computers, (or any over supported system).
They won’t learn to ride the bike until someone removes the stabiliser brackets - and Gates is one of the cunts who figured out that he makes more cash by welding them on.
Exactly. You can tell someone to type a command, and ask for the output. Otherwise you’re spending 90% of your time asking someone to explain what they see, and searching for buttons that just move around from week to week.
So you want newbies blindly entering scripts to there command line and not knowing what that are doing.
They’re blindly doing it either way. I understand and want GUIs as well, but dumping commands into terminal is starting to seem easier than “go here click this, now click that”
Open “app” -> open menu -> select option -> change this / push this button.
Just as easy to write as a command. But many people (me included) is so used to go the CLI route that the GUI way is only an afterthought.
Just as easy to write as a command.
No. First you, the helper, have to find the option in the gui. Then you have to look up every step in the path through the gui. At every step you have to find the english name for the button/menu (localization exists), and manually type it (because you can’t select and copy the text of the gui (by default at least)). Also just referring to buttons by name sometimes won’t work. It is so cumbersome.
I can’t find this menu, where is it?
Now you have to go figure out what they’re actually looking at and whether it’s what you said to do or not. Command line copy-paste removes any uncertainty.
If it’s “oh, you can open up [application X] and it’s easy to figure it out, and there’s videos out there to cover your use case”, then ok.
But if it’s to help a user with a very specific task and they want their hand held, well from a GUI perspective I’m either making a bunch of screenshots or maybe even a tutorial video or a screen share session… Or I shoot them a relatively short CLI command that does it and move on to other things.
It is usually much shorter to tell someone the CLI to do something than it is to try to train them on a GUI for the same thing. If it’s well-trodden subject matter, well they probably already found a youtube tutorial and didn’t even have to ask.
And where a typo can cause a catastrophic outcome
their* they/those*
Teach them to double check against the man page before pasting, would be my guess.
But then the CLI wouldn’t be faster anymore and the whole argument most people keep bringing up falls apart.
Also those man pages aren’t even remotely written to be understandable by Linux novices most of the time…
But then the CLI wouldn’t be faster anymore and the whole argument most people keep bringing up falls apart.
It is much faster for the one giving the answer. Also, the looking up the man page is something you only do the first time. With the gui the user should also verify before blindly following instructions, but it is usually harder to find proper documentation of gui features than cli commands.
Also those man pages aren’t even remotely written to be understandable by Linux novices most of the time…
That is a fair point. They are dense, technical and at times pretty hard to read. But when a novice asks for help they are always going to either trust blindly or verify. Verifying can be a difficult task for a novice no matter if gui or cli is suggested. I do think most novices would trust the gui way more and feel more in control of it, even if they are basically doing the same thing.
Ideally piping directly from curl to bash, yes
/s
Yep, this is just one factor. It’s difficult for people not to judge a book by its cover.
Correctly done, cli is superior for a lot of things.
I’ve been in a situation like this recently and all I can say is that the CLI is universal.
Yes, it is complex. Yes, it is challenging. But it gets things done.
Don’t be afraid.
It’s not even that complex, it just looks that way if you’re not used to using it
It isn’t, I admit. But the first impression is intimidating.
I know what you mean, just beware: in lots of cases it’s not as universal (as in distro-independent) as some still think it is.
For people who want to get things done with their PC that isn’t inherently IT-related (like, doing office work or music production or anything else) and just need to do the occasional light sysadmin thing like setting up new drives to be auto-mounted somewhere, pointing to GUI tools is just so much better. And in many cases it is also safer (making your system fail on boot with a small typo in the fstab is painfully easy).
I know what you mean, just beware: in lots of cases it’s not as universal (as in distro-independent) as some still think it is.
This is especially true when we start talking about BSDs and other non-GNU platforms.
I get where you’re coming from. But as something of an enthusiast myself I don’t always know GUI tools for all the tasks I can do in a terminal. Edit: typos
True.
As someone that started in Linux, for real, with Debian, and in a time that I had to mannually install my graphics card, I learned the way I did things on Debian was significantly different from things got done on other distro families. That, alone, kept faithful to the Debian tree.
Yeah, I’m with you. I fucked up my Deb install because I strayed from “doing things the debian way” and overtinkering with things I wasn’t meant to do.
But compared to other distros, debian feels like a bomb bunker; once you set it up, it’s going to stay set up.
Monolith is a word that fits Debian very well.
It’s like a landmark. It just exists and reality itself seems to bend around it.
I ran a Debian machine, a laptop, until the hardware literally gave up. Eight years of solid service. Regular updates and one reinstall to move to the next version.
It kept working. It kept playing music, playing videos, managing my office needs, surfing the web and receiving my email. Flawlessly.
It outperformed newer machines in its last years and people could not wrap their heads around the notion.
Debian, as a Linux+FOSS combo is a winner combo
Also, GUI changes faster than CLI, CLI has ALWAYS more options, and you can save those commands to a file.
Also can get explanations for every command.
GrapheneOS web installer appreciation post/comment
I’m a big fan of Mint specifically because they spent so much effort making just about everything accessible from a user friendly GUI. I totally agree with you, every time I see this kind of thing online I die a little.
Most people don’t want to become an expert in the task they want to do. They just want to do it once. CLI tools demand expertise.
Unfortunately in Linux, UI tools often take away some of the transparency you get with the CLI tools they’re made for.
I’ve recently tried setting up a VPN connection to my workplace using the EndeavourOS configuration UI. It basically just said “can’t connect, haha, fuck you”, so I had to dig deeper. Finding out how to use the CLI commands necessary to identify and fix the problem took some time and effort, but in the end, I managed to set it up successfully (turned out most Windows admins still think l2tp is hot shit while the Linux world considers it obsolete).
In this case, UI wasn’t as user friendly as CLI, because it hid vital information that was necessary to solve the problem.
A better UI would probably have solved that problem quicker and easier. In an ideal world, you get intuitive GUI tools that cover all use cases and you still have the option to use the CLI if you want to dig deeper. So yeah, I agree with the point you’re making - Mint trying to be as user friendly as possible by offering accessible UI tools is a good thing and one of the reasons why Mint is so popular. (It’s also a reason why Windows sucks ass, because for most UI things the CLI equivalent is either non-existent or cryptic as hell…)
The point I’m making - GUI tools should always try and make using the CLI unnecessary. Taking away complexity without taking away functionality is the key, and as a consequence, those GUI tools will not be underappreciated for sure.
I’ve noticed this problem as well, as a Linux novice. I stick mostly to GUIs, but a few times I’ve had to figure out the command line equivalent for whatever I’m trying to do because the gui program would just close and provide no further feedback. Then I get to the same step in the command line and it gives me a whole paragraph of explanation about why it failed and how I can fix it. This info should’ve been available in the gui version, maybe like a popup error message in windows
I’m glad we’re in agreement.
It all comes down to how complete and good the tool is, both for CLI and for GUI. I’ve seen GUI tools that give more information than the equivalent CLI, and of course I’ve also seen the opposite as you have.
What grinds my gears the most though is when there’s no tool at all, you need to edit some config file, and the instructions given are
nano /path/file.conf(or, god forbid, vim). It’s a text editor, why not use a normal one?! There are no guardrails either way to ensure the format is correct!Obviously in that scenario someone should make an interface to edit the config safely, be it GUI or CLI, but that’s another matter.
Speaking of which, the latest Mint released ~yesterday added a GUI to make common edits to the grub bootloader. See: https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_zena_whatsnew.php “System Administration”. I am not aware of any CLI that can do this, I think before this you had to edit a text file and hope you got it right. At least as far as common recommendations go.
I agree on CLI text editors. I get why they exist, but for most users they should be a last resort, not the primary instruction.
Instead of telling people to use Nano, just tell people to edit the .conf in a text editor and let them choose!
Many users won’t understand that what they’re being told to do with Nano is literally just edit a text document with a funky file extension, and that they don’t actually have to that it in CLI (in-fact it might even be easier not to if you’re not familiar with them).
Exception for helping someone who sshed into something and doesn’t understand what they are doing.
It happens that someone without knowledge has no idea how to interactively edit a file on a system they can only ssh into. ‘run nano’ is easier than ‘ok, now I’ll show you how to WinSCP the file down edit it, and put it back, but make sure you don’t screw up the CRLF or permissions in the process…’
You should open a bug report saying that the GUI hid the error from you. That’s a problem.
It definitely is, and yes, you’re right, I should open a bug report.
But then again, you could make the argument that a user-friendly OS shouldn’t require developer level expertise that’s necessary for opening bug reports in the first place. After all, bug reports require a certain quality level that’s not obvious to newbies (like how to reproduce et cetera).
Then the problem is the GUI not showing the full error text.
Shoutout to qpwgraph devs
I blame absolutely nobody for wanting a GUI tool for things. But the idea others are at fault for being hesitant or unfamiliar with the tool is also disingenuous, especially when the GUI just adds another layer of abstraction to the tool while removing some of the functionality (as GUI tools often do).
It’s like you’re learning to ride a bicycle. I get that you like the training wheels and they are extremely useful for you, and more experienced cyclists SHOULD be understanding and accommodating, but they can also see the ways they’re holding you back, and it’s natural for them to want you to take them off as soon as possible.
Also, CLI is consistent across any distro… GUI tools, however, vary depending on your desktop environment, distro, version…
Also, CLI is consistent across any distro…
This falsehood crashed so many devices and left so many beginners with error messages it isn’t even funny anymore.
Okay, it isn’t 100%, but it’s certainly MORE consistent than GUI, and since GUI is generally just a front-end for CLI anyway, if the CLI is inconsistent, so is the GUI, so it’s not as if GUI avoids this problem.
I finally got Docker Desktop to work over the weekend, after months of not being able to sign in - from a browser or CLI.
Some GUIs are nice. I prefer GUIs to CLI. But some GUIs aren’t as usable as CLI
I like using Podman Desktop to keep an eye on containers and glance at logs, but more often than not I’m doing most operations on the CLI.
You are not alone. It also took me months to sign in.
