IMO GUIs are always faster when it’s something you’ve never used before, or use very infrequently.
CLI is better if you’re used to the task you’re doing, or automating things. But for infrequent tasks looking up the commands (or looking at old notes to find it) is very slow and rather annoying.
I think I really only use GUIs if I am learning something new and trying to understand the process/concepts or if I’m doing something I know is too small to automate. Generally once I understand a problem/tool at a deeper level, GUIs start to feel restrictive.
Notable exceptions are mostly focused around observability (Grafana, new relic, DataDog, etc) or just in github. I’ve used gh-dash before but the web ui is just more practical for day to day use.
For context, I’m in SRE. I feel like +90% of my day is spent in kubernetes, terraform, or ci/cd pipelines. My coworkers tend to use Lens but I’m almost exclusively in kubectl or the occasional k9s.
"graphical user interfaces make easy tasks easy, while command line interfaces make difficult tasks possible"
William E. Shotts Jr., The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction
It has taken me a long time to get comfortable using a Linux CLI (definitely not as familiar with windows cmd prompt/powershell), and I know that if I log into a box anywhere, If it has sh or bash or some variant of those shells, I’ll be able to get by.
Now, on my home server, moving & renaming a bunch of media files has me really wishing I had a DE installed there to Ctrl + click/Drag-n-drop…
Also, I love using VScodium/Code as an IDE bc of its configurability & rich plugin ecosystem – but recently I had some performance hiccups with extensions not playing nice together and started (again) down the masochistic path of configuring neovim to use as an “IDE”…
It happened a while ago too. Like windows 8 I think. Old task manager popped up no matter how laggy your computer was. It has some sort of highest priority and didn’t depend on much. Making it reliable. Since 8, this changed. Any changes since have been add-ons and reskins. I like how it shows things like gpu now but at what cost.
If you’re using a GUI, that means whatever you’re doing you’re not doing a lot of it, since you don’t need to automate it. I would expect a world-class enterprise engineer to be able to automate most tasks, and from that they would be very comfortable with the command line.
Can you do everything with a GUI that you can on a command line? Yeah probably, if the developer is at all the features properly. Can you automate it easily? No not at all. So the more you do something the more you tend to want to deal with the vocabulary of the command line because it’s more expressive and allows for automation.
Depends on what system you’re running, and especially what task you’re doing. Trying to operate firewall rules via CLI is an exercise in self-inflicted pain, as is trying to set a complex cron schedule without a handy calculator.
Documentation too. Frontends change all the time, but CLI tools usually don’t, so you can usually rely on old documentation. But have you ever tried googling how to do something in MS office, found and article from half a year ago and found that none of the things it mentions exist anymore? It’s ridiculous how much time people waste trying to figure out stuff multiple times because it changes so much.
CLI debuggers can’t hold a candle to the Visual Studio debugger. This is generally not something you automate, and I haven’t met many engineers that know gdb well. But pretty much anyone can use VS debugger.
Programming aside electric self edge labels are the future. Where I work we do paper labels for about 50 pretty small stores and use best part of 30,000 sheets of paper a week.
I imagine with inflation causing an increased frequency of relabeling and relabeling costs causing an increased rate of inflation, it’s only a matter of time before I become too lazy to finish this joke.
Yeah, then you’ll have 1000 other problems but not one with task manager. The best task manager in Linux is still htop because Linux doesn’t like making GUIs that are reliable and functional. Last time I was using fedora, the mouse settings GUI wouldn’t work and I had to set mouse speed in my bashrc.
Real talk though, how long ago was that? Linux has been making improvements at a blistering pace. If it’s been a while, I’d recommend giving it another try soon.
in 2021. In 2022 I tried again with Fedora and KDE but I have an Nvidia GPU and this was around the time they just switched the default to Wayland which resulted in the liveCD hanging forever. Didn’t even get to install it again. I used to use Linux as a desktop from 2008 to 2014 but stopped because things just kept breaking on me and it was wasting my time. Eventually, my work switched to Windows, I switched to working at home and it didn’t make sense to maintain a Linux desktop that every time I booted it up, something new was broken. I’ve been checking every year into Linux since.
Sorry but in my field 70% of the people use Nvidia. So, yeah, Linux doesn’t support my workflow, Linux is bad. The end result is the OS doesn’t work properly. I don’t care how it needs to work. I need to know that it will work. If someone is causing it not to work, that’s on Linux still because the end result is still that Linux doesn’t work. On top of that, X11, Nvidia, and KDE worked just fine but Fedora rolled on ahead with releasing Wayland as the default when clearly it wasn’t ready.
Even outside of the Nvidia drivers through, since they now have published open-source drivers, there are still tons of issues with Linux as a whole. Multiple times I’ve seen basic GUIs either not work or not exist. A great example of this is: How do you figure out what driver the system is using without using the command line? Not just video card drivers which some distros have finally made GUIs for. No, like my mouse drivers, or the random Watcom tablet or webcam? Where do I see the “device manager”? Another great example is themes. GTK and QT themes do not play nicely together. Linux has a division within its own ecosystem. In fact, everything is divided and thus has issues inter-communicating.
This is not to mention the bugs I’ve encountered in multiple distros. In Fedora, the last time I tried, I couldn’t change my mouse settings in their GUI. I had to use bashrc and issue an x11 mouse setting command to get the mouse movement I wanted.
At the end of the day, I want to use my computer to do the thing I want to do. Not make simply using my computer a hobby in itself. This is the case for the majority of computer users.
Lastly, Linux as a community has a hard time taking absolutely valid feedback and brushing it off. I’m trying to help Linux by saying it’s terrible. I want it to be good. It can be good. Getting pushback for valid feedback isn’t going to encourage anyone to give their feedback which Linux absolutely needs more valuable feedback if it’s going to become a mainstream desktop OS.
Linux is also a collection of distros. We don’t call them GNU/Linux distros (because they don’t have to be using GNU. Linux is just the broader term for the community and the distros the community uses. My point, clearly, is that the GUIs that are provided on the distros or in the repos, or by the community all are terrible. If you want to be pedantic further feel free but I’m not going to engage in a semantic war.
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