linuxmemes

An at least superficial understanding of the cli is an essential part of using linux. If you don't ever want to use a cli, what are you doing pursuing linux? Do you just want a free version of windows? Go pirate windows.

GUIs are an awesome tool. Humans as a species have 5 senses, and instead of limiting computers to the narrow portion of sight needed for typing, they make full use of both our visual and aural senses.

That being said, they add another layer of abstraction away from the hardware on top of the already very abstract userspace utilities that abstract away the kernel that abstracts away the machine code that abstracts away the hardware.

All of which is to say that "Just Works" is shorthand for "I don't want to actually learn how this complex tool that I'm using works, I just want it to do everything I think it should be able to based on my lack of understanding, and do so in the way that makes sense to my ignorance. And I want it to do all that without learning why we do some steps (and then I'm going to complain about how little sense it all makes)."

That mentality is what allows predatory software companies to not only take advantage of their customers—by hiding shady practices outside of the GUI, and drawing attention to and manufacturing outrage about inconsequential "features" (like ads on the start menu)—but also exist in the first place. Pushing back against that "I shouldn't have to learn the tool to use it" mentality is one of the ways we keep scam artists and spyware dealers out of Linux spaces.

When are you REQUIRED to use cli? The app store works well, many apps have installers, and will be perfect for average users.

Advanced users should already be familiar with CLI and just need to learn a little more.

It's always going to feel like this even if you never need a terminal for one simple reason:

When you google "how to XX on linux," you're going to find a stackexchange page where someone else asked, and someone answered with a terminal command instead of "Ok what DE are you using? Ok, so you're gonna want to click these seventeen different menu options, and I don't remember them without looking at them myself." It's just always going to be easier to send someone a string of ~30char to type than to try and figure out their GUI without screensharing.

"The new Windows Terminal is so slick! And PowerShell is soooo awesome! When will Linux get cool neat powerful stuff like this?"

"Uh... About three decades ago?"

(To be honest, PowerShell is neat. But it's also cross platform, so if I really want it on Linux I guess I can get it there too? I don't really need to, I'm in middle of rewriting some PowerShell stuff in Python)

Been using Linux for almost two decades now. Mostly Ubuntu and now recently Linux Mint.

My dad who retires today and who has been a Windows user since roughly 1993 has set up multiple Pi-Holes and OpenVPN in the last few years and recently even installed Ubuntu in WSL so he can run bash scripts locally too. He's not in a tech job, he's a doctor.

A year ago my friend who has been using Windows for his gaming for the last 22 years asked my to help him set up a Fedora dual boot. Just to play around with, even though he doesn't have a tech background. He didn't really use it much. But today his work had him blocked by their own fuck-up and he decided to use the time to try it out again.

This evening he told me about how he upgraded his Fedora back to a current version using GUI tools. Then he saw that Windows wasn't the default boot in his grub boot order anymore. He tried to find an app for editing grub, realised this was the kind of thing people do with CLI. So in the next two hours he learned enough CLI using a free beginners lesson he found online somewhere, until he found the history command, where he found the grub command we used during the original setup. He was so excited about this success!

I think the CLI criticisms are way overblown, and non-programmers can use CLIs perfectly well if they want to.