Can I? Yes. Will I? No.
Some things are just faster to do via terminal so I learned to use it over GUI for some scenarios.
SUSE has had graphical administration tools for literally decades. Somehow people always forget that.
Using Linux Mint, most of what I use I could without terminals if I wish. However, just like with Windows, terminal intervention will be needed sooner or later, usually to figure out why a given program isn't working.
Exactly. You can get away without using the terminal on a lot of linux distros in the same way you can get away without using CMD on Windows... until one very specific thing breaks and suddenly it's time to run sfc /scannow for the millionth time.
There's a sysd GUI that you can use to look at logs. It's much faster to just refresh the UI than searching your history for the right command
I cannot vouch for every distro and every use case out there, but for me, yes you can daily drive without having anything to do with terminal. Some distros have worked a lot ensuring this.
I would recommend to start with Linux Mint.
I agree. In my opinion Mint is one of the few distros that actually manage to make everything doable without the terminal.
With Linux Mint you don't need the terminal 99% of the time. The rest distros are close to 95% of the time. I always suggest Mint to new users.
Last time I set up Mint the only thing I needed the terminal for was to disable a setting on Java 8 that prevented it from launching on Xfce.
I didn't need to use the terminal to do that, though. It just didn't feel right editing a system config file with a GUI text editor.
Depends on what they are doing, but I guess it's pretty usable without cli interventions - at least for standard apps and unless something gets screwed. Fedora KDE.
Just lie and say they will never need to touch the terminal, then help them out when they need to and eventually they will see its not a big deal
Unless you install fresh, run into NO issues. And basically do nothing but websurf, and basic functions, not likely.
Keep in mind, even IF something could be done by GUI, if you ask for help, 95% of the replies are immediately going to tell you to open CLI...
Remember Linux isn't an OS, it is a collection of 30+ different OSs that are mostly compatible.
basically do nothing but websurf, and basic functions
That's 99% of what most people do.
I think Gnome + Flatpak is a great setup for GUI only. Fedora is annoying to set up with nonfree drivers and codecs, otherwise it's a great choice for this.
(Also, don't try convert your friends, just wait until they come to you and ask for help installing Linux.)
Just as much as you can use Windows without the command line/powershell.
The vast majority of tasks do not require it but some will and some tasks will be easier via the terminal if you take the time to read 2-3 pages of documentation.
Don't be scared of the terminal
Yes.
After god knows how many years now of being on Linux exclusively, I tend to look at the terminal (commands in general) as a convenience more than a necessity. Meaning that in a lot of cases, knowing a command and quickly typing it to start an update (for example) is just faster and easier than pulling up the GUI every time.
I would say that for 95% of usual tasks I don't use terminal on Linux Mint Debian Faye 6 (LMDE), most of the software can be installed by double clicking a .deb file you download from the web. Compared to 10 years ago when I tried Linux for the first time (and reverted to Win back then) nowadys it is insanely more convenient to use.
turns off SteamDeck sorry, what's a "terminal"? Isn't it at the airport?
Jokes aside... yes, obviously, it only depends what you actually need to do. I recommend though NOT to be afraid of the terminal. The whole point about using Linux is to do whatever one wants. If that means avoiding the terminal, sure, that's fine, BUT I believe the goal still is to be able to do MORE and the terminal is itself a very powerful tool. It's not the terminal itself as much as the composability of the CLI.
So... finding a distribution with all the GUI and TUI and avoiding the CLI until they actually want to use them is great. Avoiding it entirely because no new skill was acquired is a missed opportunity IMHO. I want more Linux users, yes, but I also want BETTER users of any OS. Skilling up users so that we can all do more, together.
I installed Linux for my mother 15 years ago and she has never used the terminal once.
I update the Ubuntu from time to time and that’s it. Everything works and she can browse the internet, read email and listen to music.
I kind of 'force-moved' my wife to Fedora about 2 years ago, and she had never seen the terminal until last week. I saw she was about to open 'discover' to update everything, and I stopped her, opened the terminal and ran a dnf update, one 'put your password in there', and she was looking at it as if it was magic. Can you use it without the terminal entirely? Pretty sure you can. Now, should you?
Yes it is possible. I never need the terminal. If you are interested, you can usually find a GUI way if you look for one. Some people just don't look, then tell people there is no GUI for it. Not very helpful for newbies.
For those not into usability, different people work in different ways. Visual workers are not the same as text workers. So for some, CLI has poor usability and productivity. For lots of things I do, there isn't a CLI anyway.
I use Kubuntu these days. It could be better.
If you are just doing word processing, browsing the web, and playing video games then absolutely. Yes.
There have been gui tools available to install packages, configure networking/wifi, and manipulate files. For a long time now. Especially with the integration of Flatpak and snaps into gui-based package managers (like pop shop) it has become quite simple for any "regular", non-technical user to manage the basics and even the intermediates of any system (depending on the distro).
Where things will likely fall short is with troubleshooting. But to solve that we would need to build something like the windows troubleshooter. But with so applications owned by so many different groups it would be difficult/near impossible to write a troubleshooter to integrate them together.
Though I am also a bit of a hackerman so I probably also don't realize how much I use the terminal for normal things.
Tbh I can't remember the last time windows troubleshooter actually solved a single problem when trying to help people with their PCs. And there's like a fraction of a percent of the amount of discussion and documentation online for Windows versus Linux. A lot of problems for the former are literally just unsolvable.
Any you recommend for gaming? Ive had an issue getting steam games to launch, and I have heard cod will be a no-go, but that's not a big deal to me.
I play emulators mostly because I miss when buying stuff meant owning it.
The allergy to CLI is always strange to me. Computers didn't always have mice, or GUIs, and people had to learn them when they came around. It's like saying "I want to ride a bike but I don't want to learn how." After a certain point, I don't really know what to say to something like that. You have to learn how to do anything that is new to you. That doesn't make it bad, or even necessarily difficult...but anything you don't know will be unfamiliar, and one just has to be OK with that for a while until it's not anymore. I think the usability of most mainstream distros is right where it should be. GNOME and KDE have done a very good job of it (edit: barring some very important accessibility concerns, which the GNOME and KDE teams have both shown to be open to learning from and improving on).
The allergy to CLI is always strange to me.
I get it. Every single other application a GUI user has used in their life: Ctrl-C = copy, and Ctrl-Z = undo. Open the terminal, and now Ctrl-C is an interupt, and Ctrl-Z is like a pause. Every terminal emulator has the option to change these keymappings. But doing that has a bunch of consequences once you start running more than basic file operations and nano. I think this is usually the first big hurdle to get over. It's muscle memory that needs to be suppressed.
And then there's the documentation aspect. With a GUI, you can visually look around to see what can be done in a program. With the CLI, there's options that you just kinda have to know. There's -h or --help, then there's the man pages. But even just navigating the man pages brings up the previous problem of unfamiliar/unintuitive keybindings. so you could also install tldr for faster help, but the vast majority of the time, it'll be faster to just search online.
All that being said, I prefer the CLI for pretty much everything, and think it would be interesting if there was a sort of pedagogical distro to teach the command line. Imagine a file browser that displays the underlying utilities/commands being used. Like, when you open your home folder maybe there's a line showing 'ls -al /home/me | grep [whatever params to get the info being displayed]'. Or, when you go into the settings, it shows you the specific text files being edited for each option. Something that just exposes the inner workings a little more so that people can learn what they're actually doing as they're using the GUI
I've been using Arch for about 3 years now myself and shamefully ... I do most things without the terminal.
I still use it for a handful of things of course, I don't know if there's a GUI interface for upgrading by I just prefer manually running pacman and inspecting things myself. I write a few small helpful Python scripts here and there to manage my abundant, unrepentant pirating, but otherwise I'm just browsing and gaming.
I really don't think you can (or should) fully escape it, but it's been minimized to a point where it's never been before. Depending on where your friends are at, leaning into the hackerman thing might be useful? Get them set up with Ghostty (running some flashy shaders) and oh-my-zsh so they can feel cool, then teach them how to run pacman -Syu or sudo apt upgrade. Once they're comfortable with the concept, introduce them to a few little helpful Python or bash scripts or show them how to run htop and kill some processes. I think if you can get people sufficiently interested they're more eager to pick things up on their own and run with it.
I use Bazzite on my main battlestation and have only really "needed" to use the terminal once (in about a year). It's definitely what I would recommend for people just switching from Windows, even if they don't game.
As a Linux Mint user who has only used Linux Mint, Yes, I've hardly used the Terminal, I've really only used it to download & run specific Software which is really just optional most of the time.
Nope. Every Linux distribution I’ve used has needed access to command line at some point. If anything goes awry people will always give you steps how to fix it from command line.
Now I’m not saying all this couldn’t be done graphically, but you very rarely find steps that way.
over the years i've had trouble with the various app stores like Discover and Pop!_Shop which for me led to the use of the terminal. other than that there is the occasional permissions issue that may have a graphical solution but i've always used chown on the command line.
I've been using Bazzite for a year without ever touching the terminal. I came from Windows.
Fellow Windows-to-Bazzite migrant here
I had to use the terminal to address some Nvidia driver weirdness, but aside from that, I really don't use it much if at all.
The terminal feels to me like it did on Windows - a useful tool to troubleshoot things - rather than a necessity.
This is also coming from someone who isn't uncomfortable using a CLI, but just prefers GUI for my day-to-day tasks.
Yes. There are distros such as LinuxMint Cinnamon Edition that allow doing everything from the GUI.
The issue is when searching for answers most will provide a solution using the terminal, even when it is doable using the GUI.
Not a chance. Someone else can easily, but I wouldn't be able to resist.
I don't know why you would want to use linux without the terminal? I mean, you can... but you'll be limited if you want to do something special or fix a problem. It's not like you have to know how to code or anything. Often you can copy the commands right into it... It's really no problem.
People who have been using Windows their entire lives simply get intimidated
I think Fedora is an excellent choice. It has up to date packages and its integration with KDE Plasma is pretty good.
On Linux Mint, most updates and backups can be automated; installing ClamTK from Software Manager can be automated; the Software Manager, itself, is a GUI.
The terminal is helpful but required? Not really.
I’m same as you (7 years though), but I have Fedora as a family computer. I mostly like it. I used Fedora for a year almost exclusively a couple of years back, and I quite enjoy the experience as a macOS refugee. Tried Silverblue (immutable distro), it looks even better for an average folk, but I haven’t used it for a long time to comment on that.
Recently, a Fedora installation broke on me (bad kernel upgrade), and was so for a month, spanning 4 kernel upgrades. I had to manually boot into a working kernel (F8 during boot in grub), and remove the new kernel. I avoided updates till there was a newer kernel version, tried again, to no success. It took them a month to fix the regression, now it’s good back. The kernel versions were since 6.17.10 till 6.18.4, and time frame was since December 14th till January 12th this year. It was relatively trivial to troubleshot (I used ChatGPT for assistance, but I was knowledgeable of what I was doing).
I have no idea what would a regular new user do. I have no idea how a Silverblue version would handle this situation, I have a regular Fedora Workstation installed.
However, apart from that, I have been running Fedora without any issues for years. One computer runs about 5 years now. The other served me for a couple of years, now it’s Arch Linux server, but it had no issues at all.
I guess I’d avoid Ubuntu. I might have tried Bazzite (if for gaming) or Pop_OS! (for their Cosmic Desktop thing). I have no other distros in mind. I don’t like Debian, especially for a desktop, it’s too old, and running testing… well, I’d rather run Arch then.
Fedora has RPM Fusion, which is kind of AUR, so distros based on it should theoretically have it too. But I don’t have any first-hand experience with that.
Yes, there are several distros that come with many things prepackaged. See Fedora, CachyOS, and Mint for examples.
I’ve used it like five times or so on Mint. I guess I’m mostly just doing stuff for Jellyfin but updates and everything are quick and easy and all gui. I went straight from windows to mint and it’s been a pretty smooth transition
Ive only used the terminal on my laptop for installing programs i could've installed from a gui, and for updating. Which i could've done on a gui.
So i think so? Manjaro btw
I'm torn on this discussion. Full disclosure, I don't really understand GUIs and get confused with icons and such. I'm a command-line person and have been for decades. I'll use image editors and IDEs and so on but they often leave me frustrated.
That said, I totally get that other people are not the same, and that's completely valid. If a regular task can only be done from the command line then there's an opportunity to fill in the missing piece, the GUI. It's not a waste of time, even if the GUI is "less efficient" - it's what a lot of people find comfortable.
Where I fall on the other side is the rise of ChatGPT and its friends. People are overwhelmingly positive about typing their problems into a text box, but when the response is "paste this into a terminal window and press enter" they bail out. They're happier to go through a dozen screenshots showing them where to click through menus to get to the option visually, even if they have to try multiple times because the GUI changes with the direction of the wind and the terminal stays consistent.
Yes. I agree these chatbots are another text interface like a CLI. So to me that's again a barrier to usability when I wish to refer to graphical or linked logical items on my screen that don't have any text description. I don't work in a purely text world, where usually there are no CLI commands for what im doing.
Its likely these people find a chat bot easier as they don't need to memorise a command plus modifiers exactly letter perfect. Where one mistype can fail, or worse. Two big issues people have with a CLI. And the chatbot output is made readable too. Where on a CLI it's hard to know if something worked, not being familiar with the terminology it spits out.
Windows refugee here. I installed Debian 13 with KDE Plasma on my main machine four months ago and I am still ironing out issues. Eg CUPS was asking me to login all the time and didn't accept my credentials. After some days researching I discovered I had to log in as root. Then, I discovered I didn't have root credentials for some reason. I had to create them and then add my local user to a group! Just to be able to use my home printer.
Or suddenly my clock was 62 minutes off. I discovered the NTP service was never set up properly and I had to install chrony.
I don't see how I could have avoided using the terminal. These are only a couple of examples. No deal-breakers and on this occasion I had the time and determination to resolve them. I could have easily given up.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0