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Almost as annoying as the windows evangelists (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 59 points 2 years ago (55 children)

Are there people who are mad at other people for using the terminal? Is this really a thing that exists?

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  • [–] 34 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Not really. But you know, gotta find ways to feel smarter than other people so here we go.

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    And those Windows evangelists! Don't we all know 'em with their strong opinions about operating systems? *shakes fist at cloud*

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  • [–] 31 points 2 years ago (20 children)

    There are definitely people who think it is reasonable to memorize button locations and 10 levels of menus in GUI programs but would rather go into cardiac arrest than use something like program --option input-file output-file.

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  • [+] 20 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (14 children)
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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    While you don't need to memorize button locations and menus, the frustration is that it takes longer, and memorizing those details slightly mitigates. It's torture helping someone do something while they hunt for the UI element they need to get to the next level of hierarchy. They will do it, in time, but it just feels like an eternity.

    The main issue in GUI versus CLI is that GUI narrows the available options at a time. This is great, for special purpose usage. But if you have complex stuff to do, a CLI can provide more instant access to a huge chunk of capabilities, and provide a framework for connecting capabilities together as well as a starting point for making repeatable content, or for communicating in a forum how to fix something. Just run command "X" instead of a series of screenshots navigating to the bowels of a GUI to do some obscure thing.

    Of course UI people have generally recognized the power and usefulness of text based input to drive actions and any vaguely powerful GUI has to have some "CLI-ness" to it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    To be fair if you want to learn your options (without properly informing yourself using a manual) tab complete can be useful if implemented.

    Also most programs come with their manuals so I'd barely call it external. The manuals are also usually better than what I've come to expect from the text to go with buttons in a GUI.

    Knowing what commands are required is always going to be necessary but there's also not that many worth remembering.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    As far as I'm concerned "windows key, start typing the name of the application" or "CMD+space, start typing the name of the application" is the right way to handle GUI. Apple nailed it with Spotlight and it's vastly improved Windows and a variety of Linux DE's

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Uh.. Do you think spotlight was first doing search by typing from a hotkey..?

    What you're describing are basic menus and icon search. I honestly don't get what you're getting at with this at all, maybe I'm just dumb.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    I suppose the point is that the way people interact with GUIs actually resembles how they interact with CLIs. They type from memory instead of hunting through a nested hierarchy to get where they were going. There was a time when Desktop UIs considered text input to be almost a sin against ease of use, an overcorrection for trying to be "better" than CLI. So you were made to try to remember which category was deignated to hold an application that you were looking for, or else click through a search dialog that only found filenames, and did so slowly.

    Now a lot of GUIs incorporate more textual considerations. The 'enter text to launch' is one example, and a lot of advanced applications now have a "What do you want to do?" text prompt. The only UI for LLMs is CLI, really. One difference is GUI text entry tends to be a bit "fuzzier" compared to a traditional CLI interface which is pretty specific and unforgiving.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    It wasn't the first, no. But it was the first that was commonplace and implemented well enough that others almost immediately adopted it.

    It's the same as the iPad. Tablets existed before the ipad. Nobody bought them until apple created a market for them. It's their biggest strength as a company.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Ahh I hate that windows does that. It makes it impossible to do anything else with the super key.

    Super+D is what I use but anything but just tap that button and flash your screen with a menu you didn't want is great.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (10 children)

    It's not that they are mad others use CLI, it's that they're mad that Linux devs regularly stop creating P&CI features, instead opting for CLI with no P&CI equivalent action.

    It's kind of obvious why - CLI is already very flexible right out of the box, and it takes much less work to add functionality within CLI rather than creating it for the P&CI.

    At the same time, I understand the P&CI folk's frustration, since one of biggest obstacles to getting more people on Linux is the lack of P&CI solutions, and the fact that many actions on Linux are explained solely via CLI.

    CLI folks have invested the time to use terminals effectively and view overuse of the P&CI as beneath them, and P&CI folks have no interest in dumping time into learning CLI to do something they could do on Windows with P&CI.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    Linux is the terminal.

    The GUI applications are just terminal applications where you press buttons instead of typing. Creating the buttons and UI is extra overhead for developers.

    CLI folks have invested the time to use terminals effectively and view overuse of the P&CI as beneath them, and P&CI folks have no interest in dumping time into learning CLI to do something they could do on Windows with P&CI.

    There are people who have learned to use Linux, using whatever tools are best for the job and people who have decided that the only way to interact with a computer is with a mouse and refuse to learn anything else.

    You don't have to swap away from Windows. But, if you choose to, know that you will have to learn a new operating system and, on Linux, this means becoming familiar with the terminal.

    If you're going to artificially limit yourself, despite the chorus of Linux users telling you otherwise, by deciding that any terminal use indicates a failure of the OS or of developers, then you should not use Linux.

    It's hard enough to learn a new OS. Artificially restricting yourself to only using your mouse is going to severely limit your ability to function.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    they're mad that Linux devs regularly stop creating P&CI features, instead opting for CLI with no P&CI equivalent action.

    I've never seen this?

    It's typically a completely different developer who creates the CLI first, and then one of us adds a P&C after.

    So if something is brand new, sure there might be no P&C, yet.

    I promise There's no conspiracy to not have nice things. Haha.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I was specifically trying to not sound conspiratorial. I'm pointing out that it's a matter of having learned a paradigm vs having to learn a new paradigm.

    Devs have already gotten used to CLI and very rarely make full P&CI suites because of it. Even if the original Dev only did CLI for the app and someone came back and made a P&CI for that app, those P&CI interfaces are still fairly barebones. This is both a mix of devs knowing how good CLI can be and because it's all open source volunteer work.

    Layman users of P&CI-focused DEs actively avoid CLI so they don't have to learn it. This means that using most Linux apps are something to be avoided for most Windows users, making the OS base mostly unusable for them.

    To be clear, when I am talking about P&CI-focused DEs, like windows and iOS, I mean that if you cannot perform an action with the P&CI, then that action essentially does not exist for the average user. Contrast that with Linux DEs, where it's quite common to have to directly edit configs or use the CLI to perform various actions.

    As a veteran user, CLI does not bother me. I do understand the frustration of those who want some Linux DEs to become as default as Windows and iOS, because lack of P&CI does damage that effort.

    This is not every app in Linux obvi, but the ones that are best at making sure the P&CI is full-flddged, are the apps that develop for windows and iOS as well as Linux - Blender, LibreOffice, Logseq, Godot, etc. The most common offenders are the utility apps, such as those that handle drivers, sound systems, DE functions, etc.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago*

    This means that using most Linux apps are something to be avoided for most Windows users, making the OS base mostly unusable for them.

    I take your point. And this was very much the case for a long time.

    But it's worth pointing out that Gnome and KDE are both done, now.

    I haven't been forced to reach for command line to change something - anything - on either of my last couple of Linux installs.

    Edit: I almost didn't notice, but it feels worth celebrating and raising awareness.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    In a pretty high end high tech company, there's still lots of people who see a terminal and think "ha hah, they are still stuck in old mainframe stuff like you used to see in the movies".

    My team determined long ago that we have to have two user experiences for our team to be taken seriously.

    A GUI to mostly convince our own managers that it's serious stuff. Also to convince clients who have execs make the purchasing decisions without consulting the people that will actually use it.

    An API, mostly to appease people who say they want API, occasionally used.

    A CLI to wrap that API, which is what 99% of the customers use 95% of the time (this target demographic is niche.

    Admittedly, there's a couple of GUI elements we created that are handy compared to what we can do from CLI, from visualizations to a quicker UI to iterate on some domain specific data. But most of the "get stuff done" is just so much more straightforward to do in CLI.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    I don’t think so, but I do criticize not having an option, that is why I stopped using Cisco personally and professionally, some things are fast using the cli, some things just need an Ui, you need both.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    A cli is a ui. I know that's pedantic but this is Linux memes

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  • [+] 4 points 2 years ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)
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  • [+] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)
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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I think of tui as "text user interface" and use it as a broad category but mostly for more advanced clis that have a graphical quality to them despite being text based, such as ranger or slack-term. Some tuis even have mouse controls!

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    Like I get and appreciate the CLI and for networking, that's pretty much all I'm using anyway, but I am shocked that enterprise networking doesn't even bother to do any GUI. Once upon a time Mellanox Onyx bothered to do a GUI and I could see some people light up, finally an enterprise switch that would let them do some stuff from a GUI. Then nVidia bought them and Cumulus and ditched their GUI.

    There's this kind of weird "turn in your geek card" culture about rejecting GUIs, but there's a good amount of the market that want at least the option, even if they frankly are a bit ashamed to admit it. You definitely have to move beyond GUI if you want your tasks to scale, but not every engagement witih the technology needs to scale.

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  • [–] [S] 7 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I posted a meme a while back and out of the woodwork comes some guy ranting about how apt install sshfs is confusing. Like, the meme wasn't even about CLI vs GUI lol. Nobody was claiming superiority, but there they go ranting anyway.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    To me apt is confusing but that's because I've become so used to pacman. The only package manager that comes close to pacman for me is xbps.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 years ago

    Yeah apt tends to shit itself very often. I don't like how it's actually two different programs (dpkg and apt) glued together with perl and python. It all feels too fragile. A friend once tried updating a package, and it failed because... he was issuing the apt command from with a python virtual environment. Can't say for pacman because I've never used arch, but xbps is just one set of self-contained binaries, which feels much more robust. Alpine's APK fits that bill as well, lovely little package manager. Tho I guess apt predates both of those, so it's not a fair comparison. Someone had to make those mistakes for the first time.

    I also really dislike the Debian/Ubuntu culture of fucking around with the sources file to add other people's repositories on top of the distro-default ones (ubuntu calls this PPA). It's a good idea in theory, but in practice those third party repos always fuck up in some way and brick your package manager. Just search for "apt Failed to fetch" in your favourite internet search engine, and you will see hundreds of people confused about it. You can do it with almost any package manager, but for some reason it's mainly the debian/ubuntu people who like shooting themselves in the foot like this.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I have a coworker that likes to pick fun at my usage of CLI tools. He said it's confusing "why would I use a terminal when the GUI was made after?". They vehemently hate anytime they have to work with CLI.

    I watched them use an FTP program to download and change one value in a .conf file. Like they downloaded the file, opened it in notepad++, changed one thing, saved it, reuploaded / overretten the original. I tried to show them how to just use nano and got told their way was "better since you could ensure the file was replaced". Its okay, I've secretly caught them using it a couple times lol

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