Well yea, Linux is about learning how the computer works; wheras windows wants to hide it
No. This may be the case for some distros like Gentoo or Arch, but applying this to the whole ecosystem and expecting everyone to even be interested in computers (which they should not fucking have to be to use a user-friendly Linux) is what alienates people.
Exactly. If Linux expects me to open a program before I can use it, that’s already too complicated for most people. I want to just tell the computer what I want and have it so it for me. I don’t want to know what a file is or what Firefox does, leave that nerd shit out of my OS.
Then go to apple or smth?
Using the terminal is actually telling the computer what to do.
Linux is community made and it will kill itself it it doesn’t reproduce.
Linix needs people to understand it, so we can maintain it.
iPhone is too complicated for most people who don’t want to know what an app is
Linux is software.
It doesn’t contain this intrinsic meaning you refer to.
Linux is FOSS, maybe check that up?
If you see having to use the terminal as a failure of the operating system then you shouldn’t use Linux
You don’t have to live in the terminal, but the amount of people who treat the terminal like it’s lava is too damn high.
That just isn’t how novice users interact with a computer, though. Most mainstream OSes have GUI for anything you’d need to do as a novice.
Most mainstream OSes have GUI for anything you’d need to do as a novice.
And how is Linux any different?
I’ve literally had a non-technical person who used Linux for less than a week fix an issue through the xfce gui while I was googling a solution.
You just need to choose a correct distro and DE for the job.
Touching virtual buttons on a multitouch screen wasn’t how novice users interacted with a computer until it was.
To me this feels like recommending Android to someone and then people on social media saying that I’m elitist for expecting someone to use a computer with only a touchscreen when everyone knows that you interact with computers with a mouse and keyboard.
I’m not speaking hypothetically, this was the exact argument people were using when smartphones were still nerd toys and not a standard part of human experience. “Nobody will ever use them”, “they’re too confusing”, “typing on a screen is too clunky at least my flip phone has buttons”.
People can learn. As soon as the iPhone came out suddenly everyone was capable of using a touchscreen interface and learning a new OS.
Linux isn’t for everyone. But if you’re going to choose make the leap to Linux, you will be using the terminal occasionally. You don’t have to be a terminal-only user, most people use a GUI for daily tasks.
As long as you’re okay learning how to do some basic terminal tasks you’ll be fine. But if you come into with the mindset that the terminal shouldn’t be needed and get upset at people for telling you otherwise, you’re going to have a bad time.
The difference is that the touch screen stuff was a more dumbed down experience, not an increase in difficulty and options.
Thing is, terminal came first, then came a gui tool make things easier, more intuitive and then came touch to make things even easier.
Saying users should just get used to using the terminal feels to me more like someone designing a smartphone in 2025, that requires you to use a trackball and physical keyboard and then complaining about people wanting touchscreens, when they clearly could just get used to the trackball.
Of course they could, but why should they want to?
Using the terminal is not the next evolution, it’s technically two steps back. That doesn’t mean it’s bad or doesn’t have it’s place. It can be incredibly efficient for power users. But most users aren’t power users. They want the operating system to get out of their way so they can focus on what they actually want to do. And that’s not learning how to update their system via the CLI.
We’re not talking about most users, Linux isn’t for everyone.
Every time this argument comes up people always point at someone like their grandmother and her inability to learn the terminal as if that is the target audience for Linux. It isn’t, Linux isn’t for everyone. It’s an operating system built by and for enthusiasts.
There has been a lot of improvements to Linux so that ‘enthusiasts’ need to do less work but even the most user friendly distro requires you to use the terminal for some tasks.
But why shouldn’t it be for everyone? Why do grandmothers have to use Windows or macOS?
I mean, yes, for now, Linux isn’t a everyman‘s OS. But why shouldn’t the community strive to make it so? Isn’t the idea behind FOSS „by the people for the people“ not „by enthusiasts for enthusiasts“?
And I’m not saying that every distro should be idiot proof. The Arches and Gentoos do have their rightful place. I just think, the mindset should be more „how can we make Linux as a whole more accessible and inviting for everyone, so FOSS can become the dominant type of software one day“ and less (and I’m exaggerating here) „how dare regular people want to benefit from the same freedom as me, this should be for enthusiasts only“.
Because at the moment, only valve is really doing something to make Linux more mainstream and do you really want that movement in the hand of a company instead of the people?
I’d take it a step further that by “by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts”, they’re really meaning “it’s for the elites”. They like that it’s hard, they had to work to learn it and they’ll be damned if anyone should get it easier, and also it’s a way to flex on people.
I may be overstating this person’s take on it and reading more into it than is there, but that’s my general view of this enthusiast (elitist) mindset, and really, it isn’t doing anyone any favors.
Regular joes can’t really hurt the direction of this ecosystem; corpos are limited in the influence they have over it, and anyone can exclude their contributions (even systemd can be left out still). But more people using it means more resources available to improve things and more interest in that happening. It also means more direct support for mainstream programs rather than just a hodge podge of companies throwing out minimally usable versions as a proof of concept and not bothering to go further with the work of Wine, Valve through Proton and Steam Deck, and CodeWeavers, to pick up the slack and try to get things to mostly work right.
Anyway, tl;dr, I agree with you… The Gentoos and Arches aren’t going away just because there’s more mainstream interest, if anything they’ll get more enthusiasts to join because they got the itch from the easier distros, much like a gateway drug.
Absolutely! Honestly I feel like human apathy towards leaning new things has increased exponentially over the years. People are thinking less and less, especially with Ai enabling people to put their brain in a jar and forgo critical thinking themselves.
Everything but ffmpeg. ffmpeg was what made me accept (with silent contempt) the Terninal on Windows, fish made me love it on linux
Nah, that’s wrong.
normie users should not have to use the terminal
some linux users dream of having their grandma run linux so they never have to look at windows or macos ever again
I’ve gone back and forth on this topic over the years, but I’ve finally just come to the conclusion that the year of the Linux Desktop just…shouldn’t come, and I hate when I see this argument that people shouldn’t have to learn to use the terminal.
The terminal is about as difficult to learn as a Word Processor or a Spreadsheet Application.
Sure, it can get complicated sometimes, but most of the time you just become familiar with your daily habits in it and when something weird comes up that’s what a search engine is for.
A lot of the time when I hear “Computer users shouldn’t have to learn how to use the terminal,” what I hear is “Computer users shouldn’t have to learn how to use the Computer.”
f you want to play basketball but don’t want to pick up a ball or learn how to dribble, then you don’t want to play basketball. Maybe you just like to watch basketball?
But using a computer is not a spectator sport, you’re typing and clicking and touching, etc. You’re interacting with the computer, and thusly you have to speak it’s language, at least a little, to get stuff done.
Additionally, most Linux Distros these days have made things incredibly user friendly, just not as braindead easy as Windows or MacOS.
Beginner friendly distros (Ubuntu, Mint) generally require you to open up a terminal to update your system and install/uninstall new software, and that’s usually all you have to do. That is a couple commands to remember and one password.
If most people can’t manage that then, yeah, I’m sorry, Linux will never be for you, and distros shouldn’t inherently have to create an autoupdate fix all errors back end for you just for the sake of getting every idiot under the sun using Linux.
You don’t want to learn how to use the terminal? Then you don’t want to use Linux. You just hate Windows, and hating Windows does not mean you love Linux.
Saucy rant over.
But why not make Linux idiot proof? What would you lose from the existence of a distro that has an easy gui tool for everything an average computer user would ever do?
The terminal wouldn’t go away or lose it’s functionality, if that’s how you prefer doing things but it would open up the benefits of Linux to a way bigger audience.
Because knowing how to use a terminal is not the same as knowing how to use a computer. Windows doesn’t need you to use the cmd for anything most people would ever do. Neither does macOS, Android, iOS, even ChromeOS. Only Linux can’t get rid of that stigma and I just don’t get why.
Why is it better to force users to run updates via the terminal than having a menu for that in the settings or the „AppStore“ (graphical package manager) or a „Update“ app?
Why don’t you want Linux to become easy enough to use that my grandma could handle it?
Because the use of the terminal is as intuitive as using a Word Processor. Learning to use the terminal is as important as learning how to type. Without this knowledge, I’d argue you’re not using your computer, you’re spectating. Which is fine if you’re paying for support, but with Linux you are doing no such thing unless you use Redhat.
As soon as computers hit the general public, there should have been a mass effort to teach people that the terminal is the main interface through which everything happens on a computer, just like there were a ton of men suddenly learning to type in the early 70s when computing suddenly became important to everyday work. Prior to that typing was considered the sole domain of female secretaries. But this never happened for use of the terminal for better or worse.
Ultimately I get that people don’t have time to learn everything, but, again, the terminal is as ubiquitous as the Word Processor and ten thousand times more powerful. The fact it is not a staple in the arsenal of anyone who has ever sat in front of a Computer screen is a sad state of affairs.
The argument I’m making is that we have multiple generations of people where the majority of them simply don’t speak the language of computers while the majority of them have to use them everyday. It’s no wonder they all get so frustrated. If only someone had taught them how to use it in the first place rather than gave them a bandaid solution that hides the majority of what’s happening behind the scenes.
While frustrating to learn at first, that is all learning, it is always hard to learn something new. Picking up a Word Processor is hard, learning to use Graphics Manipulation Program is hard, etc. But people rarely argue you shouldn’t learn to use those tools, even though the terminal is just as essential to modern computer use as those tools. Again, we have multiple generations who generally lack the knowledge on how to use something as essential as the Word Processor, and that is a damn shame.
The CLI is very much an enthusiast/professional tool. It isn‘t and it shouldn’t be the default in this day and age. Saying everyone should know how to use the CLI is like saying everyone should know how to use a DSLR camera instead of just relying on their phone’s or everyone should know how to drive a manual transmission car. Those are all great skills to have but most people just want a snapshot or a car that gets them from A to B safely. They don’t want to think about it. And most people just want a computer that gets out of their way. And why shouldn’t they have it?
And I’m not saying the terminal shouldn’t exist and that people shouldn’t be encouraged to learn about how it functions. But there should always be the option to completely avoid it. Because of you want mainstream adoption, you need to face the sad reality, that the Mainstream doesn’t want to look under the hood. And if you don’t want mainstream adoption, why?
I do want mainstream adoption … of the terminal. The terminal is not just a professional tool. In fact, whenever anything goes wrong with your computer silently, I can almost guarantee there’s some helpful output that you’d see had you been invoking that program from the terminal. So what ends up happening? You go to a “professional” who looks at that output, search engines the output, and uses the online documentation to attempt a fix.
The analogy to the car is somewhat apt. I’d argue we’d all be better off if we knew how to at least do some basic mechanic work. This is the same thing. I’m not saying we all need to live in the terminal…I’m saying we all should know the very basics around it. Update our system, read and search error problems should they arise, and know when and where to reach out to others for help when we can’t solve it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest everybody learn a tool, especially when, again, that tool becomes ubiquitous amongst anyone who does any troubleshooting with computers on a regular basis (i.e. everyone who ever encountered an error ever).
I don’t care about mainstream Linux adoption. I care about mainstream curiosity into how things we use everyday work and attaining a basic knowledge of it.
Many attempts have been made at graphical package updaters, and honestly they always end up just outputting an error message when something goes wrong. The reason it frustrates new users so much is that they aren’t used to having to troubleshoot their own systems. If they don’t wish to do so, that’s fine, but then they should pay for support since that requires other people’s time, efforts, and skills to do so.
Arguing that everything should just work on Linux, a free OS, without having to troubleshoot things on your own (which, again, 99% of the time, involves the terminal regardless of what OS you’re using), is simply a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it too. If you want to run Linux, and you refuse to pay for it, then complain that it should be more “user friendly”, which is just another way of saying “I want tech support but don’t want to pay for it”, then it shows you probably shouldn’t be using that OS, and maybe you don’t understand even the basics of how a computer works?
If you’re just not willing to do even the bare minimum to open up a terminal, attempt to run the program, read the output, and then research said output, then you should be on a platform that will provide the support you need should anything go wrong. In other words, you should be on Windows or MacOS.
If you all want the year of the Linux Desktop, and you all seem to be proclaiming it can’t happen until it can operate without the use of the terminal, then you should pay a group of developers to develop it and provide support for it. Until then, you are the maintainer of your own computer, and you should probably just do the work and open the terminal up and do the bare minimum, or shutup and go back to Windows/MacOS.
Edit: wording/grammar.
The terminal will never reach mainstream adoption because it already had in the 80s and 90s and people progressed away from CLI and towards GUI. It’s archaic. It’s a fallback. It’s useful, sure. I use it regularly. But not because I‘d not just prefer having a graphical front end. It’s only more useful because the respective front end is lacking.
Also, the „shut up and go use Windows/macOS“ attitude seems very elitist to me. You‘d rather have the non techies suffer high prices, privacy violations, etc., have them suffer microsoft/Apple instead of making the system more inviting for them? And you‘d rather have another company (like valve is doing right now btw) swoop in and offer what you refuse to entertain because you want everyone to do things the way you like to do things.
my friend, I want to impart something on you. I write this with the sincere hope it changes your mind.
The average user of a computer does not want to even think about the operating system it uses.
Most people, myself included, want to work on our computer, not work on our computer (which is why I use Mint). An operating system should be the software version of a motherboard – an invisible plinth upon which all the other things you actually care about, sit. In a hardware context the things you care about are all the components plugged into the motherboard – your GPU, CPU, RAM, storage devices, and so on. In a software context, this is email, web browsing, video games, and office software, the programs the average user actually gives a shit about. Notice: Nowhere in that list does it say getting up into the systems guts via terminal or command prompt or whatever flavor of blinking cursor you prefer. Most users just want their programs to run and to never think about the underlying system, and that is okay. Not everyone needs to be technical, and shouldn’t have to be to use a computer and reap the full benefits of using one. I choose to be because I’m a fucking spaz, but that doesn’t mean someone who doesn’t want to be should instead be condemned to inferior offerings from the likes of Microsoft and Apple. If Linux were, indeed, the best – as Microsoft seems determined to prove via Windows enshittification – then it should be, ideally, just as easy for nontechnical people to pick up as Windows. If it isn’t, that’s a problem with Linux that is yet to be solved, not a problem with people.
Fortunately, my experience using Mint for the past year has been largely exactly that. It’s very close to that ideal, if not already there – I’ve had a few very minor issues, but, nothing I was unable to fix via a quick internet search.
I say all this in the hope you’ll understand, if you want Linux to take off, it needs to be accessible to the average idiot. It must be, because I don’t know if you’ve seen the news, but we are not cumulatively getting smarter.
The average user of a computer does not want to even think about the operating system it uses.
That is certainly true.
Not everyone needs to be technical, and shouldn’t have to be to use a computer and reap the full benefits of using one. I choose to be because I’m a fucking spaz, but that doesn’t mean someone who doesn’t want to be should instead be condemned to inferior offerings from the likes of Microsoft and Apple. If Linux were, indeed, the best – as Microsoft seems determined to prove via Windows enshittification – then it should be, ideally, just as easy for nontechnical people to pick up as Windows. If it isn’t, that’s a problem with Linux that is yet to be solved, not a problem with people. […] I say all this in the hope you’ll understand, if you want Linux to take off, it needs to be accessible to the average idiot.
You seem to be misinterpreting what I am saying.
I am not here as a Linux evangelical, trying to spread the
Source CodeWord of Linus. It’s admirable that you want that, you should contribute to the many open source projects that are bringing that closer to reality.I’m here as a user of Linux trying to read Linux memes in c/linuxmemes and so I focus my attention on the present state of being a user in Linux, not some hypothetical reality that, though desirable, doesn’t yet exist.
In the current state of things, Linux is not for everyone. It is a good operating system, but not everyone has the time to use it. I will certainly tell people of the advantages that it has over Windows and, for those capable, I will recommend it.
For the people that choose to use Linux today, the 1st of April in the Year of our Lord 2025: you will have to use the Terminal. It isn’t optional. Nor, despite the griping of newbies, is it a difficult thing to learn and you should become comfortable with it if you want to be a successful user of Linux. Artificially limiting yourself to GUI applications is going to make the operating system seem less capable than it actually is and you will be frustrated by a much larger set of problems.
Until that glorious day in The Future when the universal GUI DE comes out, learn to use the terminal.
While I agree with you that reluctance to use the terminal for literally anything is way too high, regular users shouldn’t have to. And some distros make that easy for them to never have to stick a toe into the terminal, and this is not a bad thing.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing that there are some tasks that can be done in a GUI.
I don’t believe that any Linux DE is at the point where a regular user never needs to use the terminal. Knowing how to use the terminal is, currently, a required skill for using Linux.
Now, don’t take this to mean that I think someone’s grandmother needs to be a terminal user. By “regular user” I mean “average person who has chosen to use Linux” and not “random person off the streets”, that person should probably use Windows still because Linux isn’t ready for everyone.
I am very proficient with the terminal. But there are many use cases when I want a OS that does not need the terminal at all. For instances media dedicated pcs.
I have a pc that I only use from the couch, for playing games a viewing media, and using the terminal from my remote size keyboard is a bore, I would prefer a 100% gui solution for that usage.
For gaming and media consumption, you can run Steam Big Picture Mode or Plex/Jellyfin which are designed for controller use.
But you’re not doing system administration with a TV remote on any operating system. By having a system that you can fully control from the terminal, you can just ssh into it to fix any issues without wasting system resources on a GUI that you will rarely use.
This is the kind of mindset that prevents mass adoption of Linux. Sure the terminal should be available but there still should be distros catering to less tech-savvy people if we want the year of the Linux desktop to arrive at all. Some governments are looking to replace Windows with Linux, and you cannot expect the average desk worker to know or even care about doing stuff in a terminal.
Year of the Linux desktop but it’s chrome os? :-)
You don’t need to do everything on the terminal – even today, you don’t have to. But you should not fear the terminal, the same way you should not fear a piano because you play a violin. Windows also has a terminal, there’s stuff that tells you to go there to enable some Powershel things, and no one complains.
Great comparison, because playing either piano or violin is beyond 99% of all people who just want to listen to music. Common users and office workers have never even heard of Powershell.
You really don’t understand who you’re talking to here. The average person hasn’t heard about browser extensions. I’m serious. The amount of even engineers that work with me who are incredibly good at one specific thing, like autocad design, but don’t really know or care about general computer things is pretty high, let alone non technical personnel. I’ve had people ask me to explain extensions and how to use ad blocking software. People just want a computer that works and does the thing they want it to without fancy things.
People don’t fear the terminal, they just don’t understand it and they don’t care to memorize things to learn it. If Linux wants to be an end user desktop, you need to do everything by the GUI. What is intuitive, interesting and easy to you is a nightmare for other people. I’m assuming vice versa if the accountant gives you a 10 dimension excel spreadsheet or something. It might just be me projecting my fear of accounting excel spreadsheets.
You should not have to learn for years before being comfortable using a computer. If everyone has to do that it’s not something that will be adopted widely, as we can obviously see with Linux on Desktop. It’s both a Software problem (either lack thereof or bad design) as well as a culture problem; the latter is what I criticize, because it’s so utterly unnecessary and alienates common people.
And the Windows Shell really isn’t comparable, it’s 100% optional.
You don’t need years for a terminal, at least not for the stuff a normal user would have to expect to do with it (so eg.: not browsing files, that has good UIs already). But you should expect to have to learn something. We require people to learn and even certify their learning when they are to drive a car for example, and for computers we are not even askng 1/6th of that, even tho the last few decades show we maybe should.
Why? A computer is not a car. You should have to learn to use certain programs, sure. Can’t expect people to master spreadsheet or video editing programs by default. And maybe you should learn about the dangers of the Internet. But, at least in my opinion, the operating system should require as little attention as possible. It should be as intuitive as possible for anyone touching it for the first time. CLI is useful, sure. But it’s definitely not intuitive and thus inaccessible for many users.
The moment you need a secondary resource to be able to use your system, that system has failed for the vast majority of users. And it’s near impossible to learn how to use the terminal without a secondary resource. A good GUI you can figure out pretty quickly.
Learn for years? Dude you just search on the internet if you need to find out how to do something in the terminal that you don’t know how to do. This isn’t the 90s where you had to have a bookshelf of technical manuals to install and run your favorite distro.
Lol okay, just enter a command from the internet you don’t understand. What can possibly go wrong? The learning isn’t about being able to enter something, but to know what not to copy and paste. Just executing commands from the internet is the fastest way to fuck up your computer, to use the CLI regularly you have to understand what happens. And to do so is something that grows over years; years of broken systems, at least if you wildly enter stuff from the internet.
This is not good enough if we ever want Linux to be mass adopted. And expecting it is even worse if this is to ever change; In my many years being into Linux I read outright warnings for e.g. Linux Mint users to not ever look for help outside of Mint forums because of this culture. Which is ridiculous, it shouldn’t be this way.
Then you have the security issue that comes from teaching users they should just trust whatever random people tell them to do when facing an issue with their computer.
That would be an issue with a GUI too though.
You can’t do as much damage with a GUI that tells you what you’re doing in regular language vs commands.
sudo rm -rf /* means nothing to a newbie
“Reset to factory settings” is pretty freaking clear
Terminal usage is a tool just like GUI tools, I don’t think it’s helpful either to preload people with the belief that it’s some arcane tool that takes years before you can start using it, like anything you pick it up by doing.
Can’t really say it’s 100% optional as a blanket case either, heavily depends on a user, my work I’ve depended on having a terminal for years, and that was even before I moved into SWE, I’ve seen lots of business developed processes put together as an amalgam of batch files, VBA/VBS, and python because they needed to put something together with what they had rights to.
Be honest that I don’t see the terminal as a barrier to Linux anyhow, for the use case of “I browse the internet and use office programs”, you absolutely do not need to drop to the CLI, at least not for Debian or Mint, can handle installs and updates through their graphical package managers. Most people probably aren’t setting up services or the like on their machines, and if they are they already require terminal usage on any operating system.
Now you’re just lying. I’m literally a non-programmer & it took me 1 month to properly learn the basics of CLI.
The lengths you terminal-haters will go to, oh man
Been using Linux for almost two decades now. Mostly Ubuntu and now recently Linux Mint.
normie users should be able to everything without using a terminal
True Linux users build their own kernel and distro from scratch from an environment running directly in EFI
Pff, I carve my own CPUs from compacted sand, like real men.
I don’t compile, I flip the CPU instruction switches manually while reading directly from the source code.
@wander1236 @Lexam with tcc, this should be possible…
https://github.com/andreiw/tinycc
Thats the neat part, we dont need to and theres literally no benefit in doing so. Heres the cycle
Linux user suggests Linux to eveyone (like a dumbass) -> people install Linux -> its not a Windows clone -> people get pissed and complain (without doing anything constructive) -> people reinstall Windows
The fact is the more nontechnical people use Linux the more complaints maintainers get, the less detailed bug reports become, and the increase to funding/contributions will be mininal if even noticeable.
I’m pretty comfortable on the command line, but I also won’t hesitate to boot a live disk and
dd if=/dev/zerothe main hard drive the moment my gui refuses to load.The simple mans solution.
Yep, same. The main thing Linux has taught me over the years is to keep good, regular backups of everything important.
I’ve lost way too much data already by fucking up grub somehow, or by accidentally letting windows overwrite the efi partition or some bullshit. I know how to recover from that now, but back in the day when I was doing dumb shit to my os pretty much every day, I didn’t.
That was all 100% my own fault btw
There’s an OS that doesn’t require command line use to do anything slightly advanced? That hasn’t been my experience.
Unfortunately I use Windows at work and I constantly use the CLI. I probably use the CLI more on Linux, but I’m generally doing really awesome stuff on Linux and really dumb stuff on Windows.
If you’re just a regular chud consumer, then maybe you don’t need it on either OS.
Giving the would-be linux newbs the benefit of the doubt, IF they have any terminal experience at all it is with CMD/PowerShell. I don’t blame them one bit for wanting to banish all terminals into the shadow realms, they had a traumatic experience.
CMD is downright awful, when Powershell came on the scene I weeped for joy at work
Counterpoint: why should the standard for “just works” mean no CLI? What if distro maintainers decide that their user’s experience is improved by relegating some tasks to the shell?
because taking away user choice and accessibility is never a good idea
Because knowing terminal commands is neither accessible nor feasible for the average computer user. It might be more efficient, if you take the time to learn it but the average computer user doesn’t want to spend that extra time. They want everything to be accessible and to be easy.
Linux should always have the choice to use the terminal. But if you want the day of the Linux desktop to actually arrive some day, you need at least a couple of distros that don’t require you to know what a package manager is.
neither accessible nor feasible for the average computer user.
Absolute hogwash. Learning like five short words is absolutely not unfeasible for any literate person, if a user can’t do that, you can be sure they aren’t actually an average user, they can’t do anything with gui either. And probably need help tying their shoes.
A two years old child can learn 5 short words. A grown up can write them on a sticky note and plop them on a screen.A good modern gui also presents itself in front of you. It directs your attention to important buttons/options. You don’t need any prior knowledge to know that a cog shaped button labeled settings will take you to settings. Good UIs are self explanatory. CLI are not.
To be able to use the terminal, you either need another person to tell you the necessary commands or search for a tutorial yourself, either online or somewhere else.
That’s not intuitive. It’s not too hard to learn, but you need to actively pursue learning how to do it. An average person doesn’t want to do that. An average person doesn’t even want to memorize more than one password. They should. But they won’t. Thus, password managers were created. And non technical minded people still don’t even use those.
You got to look at it from the point of view of someone who has no interest in knowing any more about their computer than how to turn it on, where to put their photos and how to open their browser and maybe an office suite. The kind of people that wouldn’t even update the system, if there wasn’t a notification asking for it. They’re not stupid. They just don’t care about computers and don’t want to spend any more mental power on them than necessary, the same way you wouldn’t want to think about manually keeping the timing of your car’s engine on point for the current conditions. You just want it to get you safely from A to B. Or maybe you do, but I assure you, most people wouldn’t.
self explanatory
If you ever had to teach anyone anything, properly teach, you would know it’s a myth. It’s self-explanatory to you because you’re already familiar with the logic, language, conventions. I’m guessing, you grew up with all that from childhood, and you just forgot how you had to learn all that, and now you assume this knowledge didn’t need to be taught. You think cog is a universally understood language for settings because you always had it in front of you. Just like a lot of people think/thought that 3.5 floppy is a universally understood icon for “save”, and people who grow up now have no idea what I am talking about.
And then you assume that you are the average person, and start measuring everyone by this mark.
But if several years of teaching people of different skills, motivations, and ages, how to work with computers taught me anything, it’s that there is no universal language, there is no, and cannot be anything self-explanatory, and intuitive interface is a myth perpetuated by people who newer used anything other that one OS they grew up with. There is no amount of skeuomorphism you can employ that doesn’t require at least some amount of learning.
And when it comes to learning, let me tell you, there is nothing more straightforward to teach than “you type words and then read what the computer typed you back.”
And if several years of tech support taught me anything, it’s that if a regular person who doesn’t care about a computer encounters a problem, they don’t have inherently better time fixing it with GUI, never, not at all, not in a million years. I however always have way better time helping them, if it’s Linux and I can tell them what to type and they can read me the response. This actually true even if people are good with computers and know their OS.It’s self-explanatory to you because you’re already familiar with the logic, language, conventions. I’m guessing, you grew up with all that from childhood…
This argument can be used as a reason to implement GUIs.
If we wish to market to an audience that has had some basic experience with using Windows and Mac, we can skip some of the reteaching by implementing familiar GUIs
Most people do know how to use a computer though. Windows and macOS have been around for a very long time by now, and both have not required you to use the CLI for anything but very extreme cases in more than 25 years. You’re not starting with a blank slate. They know how a GUI is supposed to work. It is self explanatory to them. Shoving them towards a CLI is making them relearn stuff they already knew how to do. There’s a reason a lot of Windows migrants end up with KDE or Cinnamon. It’s familiar, it’s easy. Most people do in fact associate a cog with settings. CLI aren’t familiar to most people and thus a much larger hurdle.
Also, I’m not talking about fixing problems. The CLI is a perfectly valid tool to fix problems. Not everything has to be graphical. Just enough that you don’t need it unless something breaks.
Most people do know how to use a computer though.
That was kind of true for a brief period of time. And even then it wasn’t true entirely. Now most people encounter a computer when they enter the workforce. They know shit about shit, they never had to tinker with computers, most of them never had one outside of some chromebook that allowed them to render two web pages. In most cases they start from basically blank slate.
Most people do in fact associate a cog with settings.
Most people don’t know that it’s cog. Most people don’t know it’s a button. Most people don’t have concept of a button in mind. Most people entering workforce right this moment never used a mouse to press a cog button in their life. Unless they’re in IT or engineering.
Also, I’m not talking about fixing problems
This is usually when you kind of required to use console on Linux, that’s why I was talking about it.
But my broader point was against so called intuitive self-explanatory nature of the menu you have to click with your mouse.
A good modern gui also presents itself in front of you. It directs your attention to important buttons/options. You don’t need any prior knowledge to know that a cog shaped button labeled settings will take you to settings. Good UIs are self explanatory. CLI are not.
it also suffers from exponential growth complexity. CLI only has linear growth complexity. Every button and element you add to a gui makes refactoring the entire GUI layout exponentially harder.
knowing terminal commands is neither accessible nor feasible for the average computer user
I don’t think that’s true. It’s literally just asking your computer what to do, much easier to remember than memorizing which subpage of the control panel opens the right wizard to get what you want.
But people don’t memorize which subpage of the control panel leads to what they need. They go after content clues. You need to change your ip adress? Well it’s probably somewhere in the settings under the category network.
But cli you have to memorize. It doesn’t give you any context clues
But cli you have to memorize
It literally keeps a history of everything you’ve typed in, that you can search with context clues or just look through chronologically and get the exact command you needed from last time. Seems like you’re just making excuses. Needing to look in a dozen different pages isn’t any easier than looking to see what program you need to use.
What if we took the most used commands and instead of having to arrow-up through them, we just laid them out in a list or a grid, so you could click on them? And then we give them a little icon each that makes it a little prettier, more quickly recognizable and easier to click on. And because there are a lot of commands, maybe sort them by category. But who’d ever want that?
Also, I don’t know, when you last used a settings app or something similar but once you‘re more than two sub pages in, you’re usually in the realm of stuff even people who use a cli a lot would have to look up the commands. Because a good UI Design makes stuff you need regularly easy accessible.
You mean something like this? They exist, they’ve been around, for awhile actually.
The problem with them is that it is simply not easier. If you know what you want to do, it is faster to press two keys and start searching history, or just start typing and use autocomplete, than it is to move your mouse to click a square. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll have to do research regardless, and maybe I’m biased but I still think it is easier to copy and paste a command than it is to read the directions to get to the submenu I want, and then replicate each step in my own GUI.
Also, I don’t know, when you last used a settings app or something similar but once you‘re more than two sub pages in, you’re usually in the realm of stuff even people who use a CLI a lot would have to look up the commands
That’s just not true, at least for Windows. Many common things are hidden in window menus that can only be accessed from specific pages from the control panel, because MS never really committed to the whole Metro thing so you gotta dig around for the real stuff that hasn’t been added to the regular control panel.
Because a good UI Design makes stuff you need regularly easy accessible.
Right, but how often are UIs designed goodly? GUIs are nice, don’t get me wrong, but the simplicity of a CLI is wrongly maligned because people think it’s scary, and are in fact very easy to use if you spend the minimum necessary effort to know what you’re doing. Literally just tell the computer what you want to do
Different is not hard. Popular Linux distros have been streamlined to the point of not needing a CLI for casual use for 10+ years now anyway.
They want everything to be accessible and to be easy.
CLI is both accessible and easy, intuitive even. The only problem is that it requires a fundamental knowledge basis, and some syntactic context. But that’s all pretty minimal.
I would argue a GUI is more confusing if it has any nested elements in it (like photoshop for example)
Agreed. But some people who never ever touched a terminal are scared by them and think they should not have to ever touch it. They can’t fathom that it’s actually less complicated to use for some tasks. And so this topic comes up every few days and nothing ever changes. Round and round it goes, like clockwork.
those are the people not even liked by lifelong linux users. my grandparents used linux and never touched a terminal. before he was mentally gone my grandpa bet on horses online. Also every gui installer was made by someone not like this.
meanwhile windows you have no choice but to use terminal as well as customized installer image if you want to mitigate the built in spying and use an offline account
I’m of the opinion that if you’re a newbie to Linux and want to use a more GUI-centric distro, then be my guest, telling someone to jump straight into something like Arch when they’re just ditching Windows for the first time is more likely to just turn them off Linux forever.
That said, as said newbie gets more comfortable with the terminal, Arch is there if they want more of a challenge, and even then with archinstall, the main difficult part is effectively nullified, although for more advanced, long-term users, fully manual installation is still there on the Arch ISO as an option, but I’d be more likely to point them to something like Debian or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed to start with as those are generally more beginner-friendly than Arch is.
It’s not either-or. You can install KDE on Arch with one button in the archinstall you mentioned, and it will be a GUI based distro, you can happily live moving your mouse around the coloured buttons if that’s your fancy.
The general point I’m trying at is just sending a newbie straight off the deep end instead of letting them in easy to start off with and letting them move on to greater challenges on their own when they feel like they’re ready for it, is going to hurt the cause of presenting Linux as a viable Windows or Mac alternative, way more than it’ll help it.
Just pointing someone just ditching Windows or Mac for the first time with no terminal experience at all, straight to Arch, Gentoo, or even Slackware, is only going to fluster them and maybe even piss them off, which the last thing you want to do when introducing someone to a new platform, is alienate them in any way as opposed to welcoming them in, which pointing them straight to a more challenging distro instead of letting them on easy with a more beginner-friendly one and letting them move on to a more challenging one when they’re ready for it, will definitely alienate potential new users.
Think of introducing someone to a new OS platform for the first time, as if you’re teaching someone how to draw for the first time, for example, ideally you’d pick fun and simple exercises to teach them the basics before going into the deeper intricacies of the subject matter at a later date if they continue to be interested in the subject matter, pointing a new Linux user to something like Debian or OpenSUSE, or even Mint so they can learn the basics of the OS platform before moving on to a more advanced distro like Arch or Slackware, is the IT equivalent of that.
In my latest experience, pointing someone coming from Windows or Mac towards Ubuntu or whatever Ubuntu-derrivative is the most popular now, brings worse experience than giving them Arch. All the problems with Ubuntu that will eventually arise will not be fun and basic. Have you ever tried to teach a noobie to install the correct NVidia drivers? Or teach someone how to upgrade their system-wide python version so their third-party ppa repo will correctly update (one that you just taught them how to add)?
I don’t know, maybe like 15 years ago that was different, but right now I can tell you from numerous experiences, Arch with KDE goes down way more smoothly than any Ubuntu or even Debian.
Unless there are zero problems and everything just works, and the user just uses the computer as an interface for Chrome, in which case it kind of doesn’t matter.
half of the time the people who swear by clis and attack people who prefer a gui can’t tell me what a given command is without pressing the up arrow 50 times first
Amateurs use the up arrow. The real pros use
history | grep 'something I remember from the command statement':)Ctrl+r surely
or fuck :)
There’s finger as well
Next time, tell them, they should install fish and starship
Ctrl+r to reverse search or use atuin shell history.
But no comment otherwise :P.
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
historycommand, 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.
I think the CLI criticisms are way overblown, and non-programmers can use CLIs perfectly well if they want to.
it’s not even criticism, it’s just people being lazy and not wanting to learn things, which is fine, be lazy all you want. But at least be honest with yourself about it.
I think people have trama from Windows CMD and DOS
It is much nicer these days
I was thinking that a lot of them are too young to even know what those are… My thought was that they’ve been raised on GUI for everything, without being able to tinker even if they wanted to, that the entire concept of CLI is alien to them.
I think a good portion of the people complaining have never touched DOS, maybe CMD once or twice with a tutorial online (which sounds a whole lot like some stackexchange user teaching me about bluez, but this is scarier because they were told linux hard.)
I’m a pretty advanced user on Windows and I sometimes use the command prompts but it’s pretty darn rare, and I certainly don’t have any commands memorized. I have a couple basic commands memorized for the run tool but even that rarely comes up. I don’t tinker with my machine for the sake of it though, ideally I want it to “just work” and I’d want the same thing from Linux. And I do want that but unfortunately there’s a few programs I need for my work that don’t run on it (namely lightroom and Photoshop). Spending time on Lemmy did make me want to install a dual boot mint though, I have a separate drive for it I need to move from my old machine, doing that soon^tm.
You need the CLI more on average using linux, but many people can still get by without it. Tbh I thought I’d need it more so I learned the absolute basics it, and then it turned out I only “need” it rarely when I’m trying to do something weird or something that should be working isn’t, but I end up using it all the time because it’s just so convenient! And I learned more as I went along. Then I learned how to write basic scripts to automate stuff I wanted it to do by just chaining some of those commands together in a file, which was even more convenient. Honestly now Windows GUI is more difficult to me, I can’t just type “yo do this shit” I have to click 4000 different things.
But yeah, adobe locks you in to windows anyway, dualboot ftw! Good luck on your journey!
Yeah, Adobe sucks major ass but while I’ve been meticulous for quite a few years to choose software that’s either FOSS or at least had native Linux versions, I can’t see myself doing the photography stuff in the alternatives. I’m moving more and more away from that work for moving images instead and the main programs I use for that do work (DaVinci resolve, blender). Thank you!
BTW, yast exists. I use it if I’m to lazy to research how stuff works.
I just installed Tumbleweed on my laptop alongside my main install (arch btw) to try it out, but I haven’t had a chance to mess with yast yet.
I think it’s fine to have some less commonly used actions be only accessible through a terminal, even on more user-friendly distros. That is basically what Minecraft does, and yet no one’s scared of that.
A sensible opinion on my porn app?
yt-dlp?
Ah yes, the good old
/time set 1000
