749
GUIs
(thelemmy.club)
An original confession bear post? Out here in the Lemmy wilds? Excellent.
This is the energy we need.
New comers should never ever see or require a terminal.
I generally prefer GUIs, but sometimes the terminal is just easier!
Skill issue
LOL! I have too much!
Can I borrow some. Promise I'll give it back
If you
- need discoverability, or
- don't need anything composable
then sure GUIs are great.
What do you mean by conposable in this context?
Like, piping the output of a program into another program.
That's not a porcupine
I can and will terminal things, but the GUI is there so why not?
It's pretty cool how both GUI lovers and terminal enthusiasts can have a great time using Linux
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.
Hyprland works great
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
I agree, but after you do it for a paycheck for any length of time it loses its magic.
Good GUIs are awesome. It's just that you often cede control to a bunch of fucking idiots who somehow think if it's not broken absolutely destroy everything that made anyone love it in the first place. 'They'll adapt'
I still do updates and most package installs through my terminal, but anything else I look for a GUI solution. I'm lazy.
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.
It's a user interface. Users are fucking stupid this the interface needs to be fucking stupid. When you have to put that much in to stop stupid the interface suffers.
Why stop stupid but not users?
Allow me to illustrate (c, Johny Silverhand):
- user fucks up
- starts complaining
- just plain tell them they got exactly what they told the software to do. End of story. Wants to quit - good luck
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.
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.
Good UX is the best, whether that's CLI or GUI. UX is under-appreciated.
A well documented CLI is easy to generate a GUI from.
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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
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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.
KDE and customization go hand in hand. Hell, hyprland and customization go even harder. It's gnome that has abandonned it
okay, that was always allowed
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That's totally fine. GUIs let us theme our terminal windows, tile them, jiggle them around, maybe even make them wobbly!!!
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this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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