Glad I could help.
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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Copypasting a term command vs. 20 pages of "click here, now click there". Which is more efficient?
The one enabling people to understand and use their devices on their own. Once you can use a mouse or touchpad, you can navigate the UI. Good UI/UX conveys function. Checkboxes insert the correct configuration in the background without possibly hazardous typos.
The CLI does nothing of this for the user, to understand it users have to invest tens, if not hundreds of hours before they get a hang of all essential commands, paradigms and tools to help themselves. They have to become IT intermediates just to use their computers.
By providing a single CLI command (which, in the worst case, gets copied by a third user on an incompatible system configuration breaking everything) instead of pointing at the GUI tools most user-friendly distros already provide you do, in many cases, a disservice to the average user who just wants their problem to be fixed. They will not be able to help themselves next time for a similar issue.
CLI it is.
If you're using a UI, and you have a question about something or don't understand what you're doing, isn't that a sign that either the UI you're using is insufficient, or your own knowledge is lacking?
Exactly. By itself, a good UI should "enable people to understand and use their device on their own". If you're a UI user and you can't figure something out on your own, maybe you need to use the terminal to accomplish whatever you're trying to do.
I also think navigating is easy, doesn't mean anyone asking for initial help using a GPS app to get on track should from now on use a book with relative directions explained in text.
You missed my point so bad that I'm unsure if it's worth trying to re-explain myself
I was answering your last point. I didn't react to the first one because implying the big Linux DEs of user-friendly distros (usually Cinnamon, KDE or Gnome) were bad is just utter nonsense. Incomplete at times in regards to very specialised administrative tasks, sure. But the features and menus that exist are generally well made.
Where did I imply that?
Right, that's all I was saying.
Lol stop putting words in my mouth
Back in the day, I learned how to network winxp machines together, without a router, and without being able access the internet to find instructions, all because everything I needed to know about any given setting was in the gui where I could manipulate that setting. I had lan parties featuring dozens of pcs, all manually configured. Was this the correct way to do things? Fuck no, but it worked. I was able to make it work because I could see everything I needed to as I was doing it.
None of the above would have been possible if CLI was the only option.
I find it absolutely baffling how an equal amount of people voting on this comment seem to honestly believe that it would've been a realistic option for the majority of people (or even everyone) to get one of those Linux books and read hundreds of sites to fully understand everything necessary to manually setup a LAN party in a reasonable time. On 4 to 16 computers. Are all gamers expected to also be interested in IT enough to read such books? Are they supposed to magically know the existence of manpages? Of course not, 90% of private LANs in the early 2000's would've simply not happened without easily navigable GUIs. At least not with computers.
The ignorance by so many in the Linux community regarding GUI is both baffling and infuriating.
I imagine a perfect world in which full guis exist for every setting, and in the tooltips for those settings you can find an explanation of the terminal command to also do the thing. In this way, the gui is the manual for the command line.
To quote Wonderbot: "I don't need tutorials, I need verbose tooltips."
Why does it have to be one or the other?
I, as someone who spends so much time in the terminal that I literally have a dedicated key to open it, would prefer a single CLI command. My grandma, who thinks the monitor is the entire computer, would do better with the "inefficient" GUI option
There can be more than one correct way to do something
Definitely the command. CLI commands are simple and portable. Asking the user what DE they are using for an extra round trip and then making a description of the pointy-clicky-ceremony has way to much friction.