Good GUI are hard to make while a good cli is rather easy.
Nothing wrong with a GUI that does what it needs without fluff.
The cli has one other benefit which I think is rarely recognised: it's pretty easy to tell someone you need to run "xyz -a -b -c" (bringing the safety risk with it to be fair), but it gets a lot harder to be like "so in the top left there is a cog button that opens a panel on the right where you're looking for the 2nd tab and there'll be a checkbox".
The things I appreciate even more than a good gui are programs with a good gui and a cli.
A well documented CLI is easy to generate a GUI from.
It is very easy to tell someone type this and shut up. I've never seen an explanation of why -a -b and -c are necessary or what they do. Although I recognise that a lot of people just want magic, and running "xyz -a -b -c" is the next best thing.
I would love to see what cli commands the gui uses, they would be much easier and faster to learn.
That's one of the things I like about yt-dlp-nis on android. You can select all the options you want through the UI and grab the resulting yt-dlp cli command.
Tbh a lot of things are just easier to show/explain with images and icons in addition to text.
And in many cases mouse control is just super handy and fast
And while a terminal can show all these things… its just not comparable, IMO.
I wouldt want to write my job application in the terminal, or design a product, or whatever else requires just a smidge of graphics
I'm just a faster typer and when I have to go back to the mouse controls I feel sluggish. Of course, the right tool for the right job, I will never find myself with a tui to manipulate 3D objects or editing images but I will go to vim for editing documents using latex
I think people are just too rigid sometimes. Some workflows are better in GUIs, some are better in CLIs. They both have upsides and downsides depending on what you're doing, and it's totally fine to prefer one to the other. Just don't let your preference keep you from learning and using other great tools!
personally I think having that all cli all the time phase is really important for a developer. Those that I've worked with who exclusively use gui's just don't have the same understanding of their system. Which is maybe fine at a certain level but not for a senior dev
I usually take the which does it faster route. Most of the time, cli wins, occasionally gui is actually faster
Can we add repeatable? CLI is repeatable and self documenting with nothing more than a text editor.
GUI? Good luck with that.
Seriously! I can do shit in the terminal, but I grew up post DOS and it's nice to just click something and have it work.
Meh, I mean you are not wrong.
What is even better though is knowing that whatever you click on is just inputting a command you could do yourself manually into a terminal. Now that is some cool full circle shit that Windows fucked up by hiding the CLI.
I remember waaaay back in the server 08-08 R2 days, you could do something in server manager (such as installing a role) and while that process was running, you had the option to see the powershell command it was running in the background. That was pretty cool
That's totally fine. GUIs let us theme our terminal windows, tile them, jiggle them around, maybe even make them wobbly!!!
Compiz intensifies
:) Did you know KDE also does wobbly windows?
You can also do shattering or burning effects when you close them!
This is the energy we need.
New comers should never ever see or require a terminal.
before I made the switch to Linux I never used a terminal. never. hell on Windows I even used a GUI for Git. I used sublime text as my IDE. if it wasn't a GUI I was lost.
Then I switched to Linux and it forced me to actually sit down and learn the terminal and now...now I have a hard time using GUI's. If something has a CLI or TUI option then I go for that over a GUI. like everything even my music player and video player. my IDE of choice now is DOOM Emacs. my file manager is Yazi. for Git I either use lazygit or just straight up the command line. but for everything else it's just so much faster and in the long run easier to just use the terminal.
All that being said if you like GUI's then hey more power to you and that's fine. that's the beauty of Linux. you run your system how you want to and don't let others tell you otherwise. Hell I know a guy that uses NixOS and doesn't have anything installed other than git and comma. he runs everything via comma. literally everything.
what is comma? difficult to find anything with a search engine lol
I CAN interact with CLI, but i WANT to interact with good GUI. I don't want to learn CLI commands when I don't have to. Especially in the cases where I use it rarely
Are you kidding? There's nothing I love more than hand typing a 400 character file path.
I like good GUIs. There are GUIs that are clean, responsive, well designed, and full-featured.
Sadly, that is rare nowadays, regardless if the software is FOSS or not.
It seems like for proprietary software, the corporate approach is to design slow, boring GUIs that lack most/all advanced functionality. It's designed for dumb users who just want to click and swipe.
FOSS on the other hand rarely has full or even part time UI/UX devs due to the cost. So often the GUIs are clunky, messy, and a horrible pain to navigate. The upside is that they usually have extremely deep features, but good luck finding them.
If I have to pick, FOSS all the way, but I wish I didn't have to. There are a few FOSS programs that have very nice UIs, Bitwarden, Protonmail, Musescore, Godot, and many are getting better, but the landscape is still rough out there.
As for CLI, I prefer it for some things, it's just faster depending on the function. I find myself operating with a hybrid setup now days. I have become proficient enough with the command line that I can switch seamlessly between my GUI environments and the CLI-only environments. I don't really think about it much anymore.
I can and will terminal things, but the GUI is there so why not?
I'm undecided with modern GUI because most modern software is just a web page now. And it will offer you a choice between boring light mode and boring dark mode.
I miss the days of GTK2 with hundreds of themes. It was one of the main reason I switched to Linux; the customization. I don't know how many hours I must have spent on gnome-look.org. Now I don't even bother to try new themes and just use Fluent-Dark. My desktop is boring and looks like everyone else that has a dark mode. I really really miss GTK2 and all my favourite themes I can't use anymore. I tried making my own and played around with Oomox but it's not the same.
But one thing that I do prefer to be GUI now is IRC. Now that there are web clients (sigh) that can display images and videos directly in the channels, chatting in text mode only is kind of annoying with all the links we are sharing.
I generally prefer GUIs, but sometimes the terminal is just easier!
I like GUIs but I also like automation. Give me a nice simple GUI but also give me a way to run from a bash shell so I can automate functions based on complex conditions and/or a schedule.
If you
then sure GUIs are great.
The thing about CLI is that everything is hidden by default. You come to the application with your own mindset and a goal in mind and you figure out how make it do what you want.
When there's a GUI, you often see everything that's possible from the start and so the application dictates how you use it.
Though, you can do either with CLI and GUI as well. That's the sweet spot I think is the best. I love it when a CLI app guides the user through a process and gives options. And a good GUI should disable OK buttons and show validation errors if not everything is entered correctly.
In a perfect world, every app has a CLI mode, interactive and non interactive and a GUI mode with full validation and responsive UI changes. But realistically, good UX is what we need, either GUI or CLI.
An original confession bear post? Out here in the Lemmy wilds? Excellent.
I still do updates and most package installs through my terminal, but anything else I look for a GUI solution. I'm lazy.
In the same way some GUIs are trash, lord have mercy some CLIs are trash. Things like adding two verbose flags makes it extra verbose. Things like the parameter order mattering. Yeesh. It can be rough. It really varies tool by tool.
okay, that was always allowed
I like GUIs if they aren't web browsers pretending to be a desktop applications.
If we want the year of the Linux desktop to actually happen we need to have good GUI tools for almost everything. The second you say "command line" most people's eyes glaze over and they say they'll stick with Windows. Believe it or not guys, most people just want something that functions out of the box and they don't want to mess with it.
I like tuis
I do too.
They are good for discoverability, but suck when you have to do the same thing 5 times.
-- signed, a guy currently having to use a GUI to update the firmware on 5 headsets, and put our standard settings on them
Being using computers since 1992. I learned with DOS and SCO Unix.
I prefer GUIs, thank you very much.
Even when the only available option for me was Windows 3.1, I still preferred it over the CMD.
A well designed GUI should give you fast access to what you need and allow you to get things done easily.
Nothing wrong with that at all.
I like GUI's, but I prefer them simple and customizable, so I eventually want to switch away from KDE Plasma to just some window manager.
It's pretty cool how both GUI lovers and terminal enthusiasts can have a great time using Linux
Hint: :q!
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