Linux

Because its easy to make a script that can chain together a bunch of commands for tasks i do frequently, so its only one manual step to do it.

Cause it is faster than GUI...

Because I'm forced to use a Mac at work. So to avoid their terrible UI, I use the terminal for most of the things. Then switching back to Linux is relatively easy.

Also it is faster in most cases and it's keyboard-first.

Because googling a command line works way better and faster than any other form.

Terminal still has use-cases imo:

• Some programs only offer CLI, no GUI,
  to use them, the terminal is the only way.
• Sometimes it's faster to use CLI instead of GUI, especially when you can use your command history to re-execute.
• Testing single lines of scripts while writing them.

Because I don't use desktop environments.

a terminal is the ultimate gui for a lot of things especially w/ ncurses mouse support. You can open N terms and easily compose a dashboard which is exactly tailored to what you're doing at the moment. A simple oneliner often solves a problem for which a gui simply does not exist / isn't powerful enough. Terminal is the ultimate gui ftw from the space yay!

Every time I touch the mouse i get a little more elbow pain. Tendens or whatever. The keyboard (an ergonomic one, at least) is more ergonomic.

I'm a software developer. I think about my interactions with computers as language. And Posix shell is a pretty good programming language.

So interacting with the computer this way just makes sense to my monkey brain.

It's easier than going through 10 menus (that are different depending on DE), because its universal on Linux systems

Makes me feel like a hacker and makes other ppl think that I'm smarter than I am... That and there are certain things that are just more convenient through the terminal

I do a bit of programming. Git help is about terminal commands. There are graphical front ends but I have to learn how to use them. I use terminal also for package management for the same reasons.

For style points at the office.

For a lot of what I do, its the only way to do it.

For everything else, there's MasterCard.

You can easily pipeline simple things to do more complex things. That's the point of written language.

I don't use it very often because my memory is for shit so I need gui options to be right in front of me.

Why should i open discover, wait half a year for it to load, search for vlc, wait half a year, look if its not a flatpak, realise its a flatpak, repeat

If i could just type sudo pacman -S vlc?

Or search how to update my grub config if I could just type grub-mkconfig -o /mnt/Boot/grub/grub.cfg?

You can use the terminal commands to automate tasks, build cicd etc. Navigating file tree and performing tasks is much quicker once you get the hang of it. Lastly it translates well on all distros and even on Mac, or windows with wsl or cygwin

Repeatibility (is that a word?) and scriptability. I find CLI tools easier to work with and easier to get information from them.

many programs don't offer a gui so I'm forced to use it.

For me it's because I get a lot of feedback, if anything I do goes wrong I know why. Also it's usually faster

Because my first deep dive into Linux was a server I built that I didn't install a desktop environment on.

Because I can do things in 30 seconds what two windows admins take 15 minutes to do with their point and clicking. Not even making this up, this happened.

Why not? It's simple, lightweight, has a lot of interesting commands that fills its respective niche really well (btop, for instance) and (the best of all) it doesn't explode my PC everytime I run such commands.

Gnome software store is absolute trash that never worked, so i had to use dnf from terminal. That's about it.

To be honest I hardly use it. I'm on Linux Mint Debian Edition and the built in updater does a great job. So I find myself never using the terminal

I usually use that to install updates.

Tell him you can "talk" directly to the computer that way.

One could ask in return "why do you use a mouse". The answer is probably "I've always done it this way" and not "after trying out different methods it's the one that i prefer".

I think about it like a tree structure for both. With a gui you have to move your mouse around to various places, with a cli each character branches off into another tree. Mathematically you can handle more options faster with a CLI.

It just works

Some applications take some time to load up visual elements that you don't need before you can start using it. When you got a lot of work to do sometimes that just slows you down.

A lot of CLI programs do one thing and do it well while also working excellently in custom scripts.

This is like asking why do you use a hammer to put nails.

I can use Fish’s history to jog my brain on actions I don’t quite remember. Remembering a sequence of screen menus to click thru is often much more tedious & error-prone. And when you have a commonly repeated process, it’s trivial to script because shell scripts are, well, scripts for that terminal shell.

Also the terminals applications are hella portable. I can use ssh/mosh over the network & have a similar or exact environment as my main PC on a remote box. vi was always a good enough editor.

1. Update and install apps
2. Edit my host file
3. Neofetch

I use the terminal in a variety of circumstances (like working on Node.js and other programming projects) where there is either no good GUI alternative or using a CLI is actually faster. I've been using computers since 1989 and my first operating system was MS-DOS, so the thought of using a CLI when necessary doesn't bother me.