linuxmemes

If you see having to use the terminal as a failure of the operating system then you shouldn't use Linux

You don't have to live in the terminal, but the amount of people who treat the terminal like it's lava is too damn high.

Been using Linux for almost two decades now. Mostly Ubuntu and now recently Linux Mint.

A true mainstream Linux distro would need guidelines like this:

• The user is never be expected to type a command into a terminal.
• The user is never be expected to edit a configuration file.
• There is a graphical UI for every possible action the user might want to (or have to) do.

This especially includes:

• Configuring audio devices
• Installing graphics drivers
• Updating the operating system
• Managing applications and storage space
• Connecting to networked storage
• Adjusting kernel parameters (This is neccessary on certain hardware, yet, barely any distro has a graphical UI for it.)

The only distro that comes close to this is Linux Mint, but not even Mint covers everything I just mentioned.

If we want Linux to succeed, there needs to be at least one distro that confidently ships without a terminal.

Eh. I'm mostly a power user, all day at work in terminals and keyboard shortcut galore.

It doesn't prevent me from laying back and running a "filthy casual" kubuntu with little to no setup at all. At one point you reach the state where you just want to use your computer, not tinker with it all the time.

I can understand people not wanting to learn a ton of CLIs, I cannot understand people refusing to use any at all. They have the distinct advantage that you can copy + paste stuff, whereas in Windows you sometimes have to follow like a dozen steps to do whatever you want to do in a 2000s GUI.

My dad who retires today and who has been a Windows user since roughly 1993 has set up multiple Pi-Holes and OpenVPN in the last few years and recently even installed Ubuntu in WSL so he can run bash scripts locally too. He's not in a tech job, he's a doctor.

A year ago my friend who has been using Windows for his gaming for the last 22 years asked my to help him set up a Fedora dual boot. Just to play around with, even though he doesn't have a tech background. He didn't really use it much. But today his work had him blocked by their own fuck-up and he decided to use the time to try it out again.

This evening he told me about how he upgraded his Fedora back to a current version using GUI tools. Then he saw that Windows wasn't the default boot in his grub boot order anymore. He tried to find an app for editing grub, realised this was the kind of thing people do with CLI. So in the next two hours he learned enough CLI using a free beginners lesson he found online somewhere, until he found the history command, where he found the grub command we used during the original setup. He was so excited about this success!

I think the CLI criticisms are way overblown, and non-programmers can use CLIs perfectly well if they want to.

What scares me is that I’ve tried to hook multiple “geekier” teenagers on Linux, and they aren’t interested. Even the math-y ones don’t know the difference between an operating system and a browser. My main computer is Arch with xmonad and it disturbs and confuses them.

We have a lost generation when it comes to computers. Lots of the little geeks that would have been playing around in the registry or learning powershell 15 years ago are so stuck in walled gardens that they don’t even know there’s a world outside of them.

Unfortunately I use Windows at work and I constantly use the CLI. I probably use the CLI more on Linux, but I'm generally doing really awesome stuff on Linux and really dumb stuff on Windows.

If you're just a regular chud consumer, then maybe you don't need it on either OS.

those are the people not even liked by lifelong linux users. my grandparents used linux and never touched a terminal. before he was mentally gone my grandpa bet on horses online. Also every gui installer was made by someone not like this.

meanwhile windows you have no choice but to use terminal as well as customized installer image if you want to mitigate the built in spying and use an offline account

Well yea, Linux is about learning how the computer works; wheras windows wants to hide it

“I don’t want to learn/use the CLI” is equivalent to saying “I only want to use features that have a GUI”, which you can already do on any operating system (including Linux).

I believe Linux distros aimed at nontechnical users should strive to not need a user to ever use a terminal, but I also believe folks should be encouraged to try them anyways.

There's an OS that doesn't require command line use to do anything slightly advanced? That hasn't been my experience.

half of the time the people who swear by clis and attack people who prefer a gui can't tell me what a given command is without pressing the up arrow 50 times first

Counterpoint: why should the standard for "just works" mean no CLI? What if distro maintainers decide that their user's experience is improved by relegating some tasks to the shell?

Giving the would-be linux newbs the benefit of the doubt, IF they have any terminal experience at all it is with CMD/PowerShell. I don't blame them one bit for wanting to banish all terminals into the shadow realms, they had a traumatic experience.

The command line allows people to help troubleshoot problems across Linux dostros without everyone's desktop having to look exactly the same.

Stop whining, you ninnies, it's a good thing!

I've been using Linux for almost 20 years, but I still remember the fear of the terminal. The truth is that there is not much that you need to learn for daily use. Unless I'm working on an actual project (like configuring servers/networking) I don't spend much time in a CLI. Start with a beginner friendly distro (Linux Mint Debian Edition is my pick). You shouldn't need terminal at all for basic usage. Next, find some tutorials on basic Linux terminal usage and practice. The goal isn't to "learn every command" but to just familiarize yourself with how it works. Learn how to navigate your files and folders (ls, cp, mv, touch, etc). Learn how to edit text files (use nano). After that, anything you need to learn will be because you want to do something beyond basic use.

It's always going to feel like this even if you never need a terminal for one simple reason:

When you google "how to XX on linux," you're going to find a stackexchange page where someone else asked, and someone answered with a terminal command instead of "Ok what DE are you using? Ok, so you're gonna want to click these seventeen different menu options, and I don't remember them without looking at them myself." It's just always going to be easier to send someone a string of ~30char to type than to try and figure out their GUI without screensharing.

I'll be honest, as a macos & Linux user, even macos, the (self proclaimed) Holy Grail of accessibility and user friendliness,required me to run a few commands to fix bugs (not in weird softwares, just stuff which stopped working through reboots in the OS itself).

You can't expect to use a computer without CLI, or what you get is windows (and even then, you might get around the CLI but you gonna need to do some cursed regedit at the first attempt of slight customization, or bug).

The only exception to this is phones, and for good reason; you hardly can do shit in phones anyway, and if it bugs all you can do is wait for the devs to fix it for you