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You don’t have to touch the terminal. You just really, really should.
Somehow I am all three of these people at the same time.
Why is it constantly booting to a black screen with text?
This is easy, just install steam and go
Ahh the beauty of this Debian server, don’t even need to get out of my sofa because I have SSH on my phone.
The HTC Dream was the peak of Phone SSH.
There was no key combo I couldn’t input, no vim mode I couldn’t use!
There was a VNC client! I could RDP to Windows machines!
I could have even used EMACS!
I mean, I wouldn’t, I’m not some kind of monster, but I could have, and that’s what’s important!
GUI has the fundamental advantage that you can mostly find your way around without having to know commands, syntax, file paths etc. That’s a huge advantage for the vast majority of users.
plus: most people learn graphically (visually) much easier than text-based. at least for me, it’s much easier to build an intuition of something if i get a graphical display of the contents in a directory. that’s why i always
ls -alhevery new directory that i enter, before i do anything else. for many people, it’s better to use GUI file explorer because you also get image previews etc. but the same concept also applies to other issues:like, if you want to configure various hardware on your machine, you open the settings app and get many icons that you can click on. meanwhile, on the terminal, there’s no clear list of things that you can even configure.
yea as much as like using the command line, I’m having a hard time remembering all the options required, especially with things i use rarely. the discoverability is just better in GUIs
Discoverabilty is the point. That’s what a GUI excels at. The focus of the terminal is “expressiveness” (I think that’s the commonly used word). It is usually clear when you need one vs the other: bulk or compound tasks, repetitive tasks, or very particular tasks are where the terminal excels.
It sounds like you might benefit from man or tldr as a sidenote. Most people know man, but tldr is also a nice to have.
I’d like to meet a Linux user who’s never had to touch the terminal.
I feel like there are levels of Desktop customization all linux users go through. start out with something like cinnamon or KDE or GNOME and then you go down the rabbit hole of tiling WMs with rounded corners, neon borders, funny looking panels and then eventually you’re just set on using cagebreak or a very simple version of dwm/dwl with no panel at all. And once you discover vim style navigation it’s over. The mouse suddenly becomes a relic.
I mostly just stopped obsessively fiddling with the visuals, I honed in on a good setup, colorscheme etc. and just kept using that. My period of trying flashy stuff like window transparency was very short, it can look cool but most of that stuff is way too impractical.
the only visual thing I use is opacity on focus with DWM. I prefer it over having a coloured bar around the window.
Can’t and don’t want to are two different things.
I feel like the meme got it backwards. People fussing over WMs in the middle, while newbies and veterans just using whatever comes by default on Fedora
Too often I see desktops where the only two graphical apps are some ultralight terminal and Mozilla. Why do they want to suffer?
I don’t wear hats cos am busy using debian
Maybe you could wear a Fedora.
I have a beautiful head of hair. I don’t need no hat.
Meanwhile myself using Arch btw
What comes default on fedora KDE spin
Literally cured my distro hopping
I stayed on it for many years, but Bazzite stole my heart
It probably has a lot of benefits but I don’t think I could ever get used to immutable linux distros, especially since I really like customisability (I use Gentoo for a reason!!)
Yeah that was my thought too, but it turns out it was a misconception. It’s perfectly customisable, I can install whatever I want in multiple ways without messing up my system. Right now I’m running IDEs with multiple compilers, LLMs, diffusion models, 3D printing slicers, 3D modeling, etc…
I’m considering trying Bazzite on a living room PC I’ll be setting up soon (HP Ryzen SFF that’s basically a small desktop Steamdeck)
Bugs.
Less so than Windows, but still more than most DE.
Sure
Using Fedora without codecs?
Honestly yes. A few years ago when I was still getting into linux I’d customize the shit out of everything, wm with lengthy configuration, mostly terminal apps, “minimal” ui with custom made themes, and all that.
My current fedora system is almost default Sway with a few convienent shortcuts and a few tweaks, using GUIs where it makes sense or simply because I just want something nice. I just don’t have time or the need for something so customized. Defaults are good.
Heck, I’m even considering switching to Plasma once I get a better PC (gonna need to sell a kidney or two for that to happen tho), since default Sway still requires considerable tweaking and there’s a few quirks I just don’t want to deal with.
I started on xfce because people said it was good for old systems. Turns out plasma runs fine on everything I’ve tried from the last 15 years!
Yeah, KDE is “bloated”, but all that means is that there’s some stuff bundled that purists aren’t interested in. It doesn’t seem to affect the speed at all.
I’ve heard so too. Might be worth giving Plasma a shot on my current shitbox of a laptop to see if it can handle it. Though that thing (about 6 years old, btw) chokes on anything that involves graphics, so I don’t have any high hopes
Good luck!
Oh no, I have to open a text file with a convenient list of all the settings for this application. How awful.
If it was convenient, every single GUI would just use that as a settings menu.
If it was up to me they would. Instead they have 14 layers of menus you have to click through to find what you’re looking for if they have it at all.
The only inconvenient part about using the terminal is knowing the command to get into the configuration files. Once you’ve done it a few times it’s simple. People just don’t want to do even the minor effort to learn that which is why these days we’re stuck with all these shit applications you can’t reconfigure at all.
GUI is simpler because you have to remember a sequence of steps for every action you want to take and then memorize a bunch of keyboard shortcuts and then do it all again when they reinvent their product in two weeks.
CLI requires you to learn how your system is structured and where things are located and then you create scripts that last years. Not everyone wants to put in a bunch of effort just to use their computer.
Anyways Firefox just updated and they moved “save to collection” and a few other things so now I need to relearn some stuff. I hope my other apps don’t reinvent themselves anytime soon. Every update I know how to use them less and less.
A regular user will never in a million years create a script.
With ai they can
And now they have bricked their computer.
Doesn’t matter, now that they can they will and AI won’t tell them no.
i used AI last week to modify the characters that get produced when i type special key combinations on my keyboard. after looking with classical search engines (duckduckgo, google) for about 20 minutes and getting confused with not much of a clear answer, i asked chatgpt and got the task done in 15 minutes and learned a whole lot while doing it, because it also explained exactly why the files are the way they are.
How will they transfer their pirated media to their NAS? Manually? Every time?
TUI enjoyer 😏
I can’t use Linux, it’s too hard!
Oh Im deeply aware those exist. My daily is Debian Stable.
The whole idea of someone not being sure if they want to use Linux while having an aversion to systemd, a system they likely don’t even have full context for, is just bizarre.
You’re either new and don’t know what you want or you’re someone who already knows well enough if Linux is for you or not, and likely exactly which version you want to use.
Exactly. The only thing a new user is really going to care about or even notice is if their hardware is well supported in first install and that the desktop environment feels like what they are used to. All of the fighting about things like systemd, snap, flatpak, deb vs rpm, etc are somewhere between a distraction and scary sounding words.
yeah, my first boot into KDE Plasma (technically Linux Mint/ Cinnamon) brought me the strange inner peace that i am now used to when I decided to try Windows vista on an old PC (at least the first few minutes, you really can’t do anything without a graphics card).
Someone could just read into it regardless of what OS they’re on and decide from there if they want systemd or not.
Right, but if they’re technically advanced enough to care about system management at that level, they really can’t expect a comfortable and easy introduction. Hence the point of them already knowing what they want by that point.
systemd would be a fantastic OS if only it had an init system.
I know you’re trying to be helpful, but I clicked the link, sure that I was ready. Now I’m scared again.
I’ve got a laptop to give it a go. Gonna save the good files and let err rip. It always comes down to just wanting something that works. I really would rather learn something else with my limited spare time.
Still scared. Getting closer to making the switch every day though.
I tried a few distros but eventually settled on mint because it largely just works for me
Bruh, just use any mainstream distro with KDE. It’s really a lot easier than the tutorials make it look.
Linux Mint is the most “just works” distro I’ve used, fwiw. It is scary to finally take the plunge, but you’ll be glad you did.
It’s not a blank screen. It’s a canvas. You just don’t know how to paint.
I have too sneezed with a nosebleed, those are spurious allegations
Me, not being a programmer or sysadmin or whatever, booting into TTY just for shits and giggles, playing videos via mpv with -vo=tct just cause I think it looks funny
Meanwhile I’m looking up the command to update pihole every patch. was it —up, -update, —update, or -up? Or was it just up?
If you know more than 3 commands I’m paying my sincere respects to you smart, kind, gay sir. 🫡
You should try “the fuck”. Wrong command? Just type fuck! It will fix itself. 100% AI free.
I’m the idiot who tries -Up
Flags have always been poorly standardized outside of system apps and tools. Generally, -u should equal --update (and depending on how the app was written, may warn for --up: “Did you mean --update?”) Single tick flags are generally combinable: -ua or -ls. I have seen long single tick flags somewhere, but can’t remember where. (Your -update example.) Various python libraries than handle flags have helped a ton with getting people to use the same patterns, so that is nice.
You just summed up my first experience with systemd many years ago.
systemctl != sysctl. Both somehow got wedged into the same index in my brain and took years for me to correct. On top of that, <service> <action> was reversed to <action> <service>. (Or was it the other way around?)
I was convinced from my first experience with systemd that the person who wrote it was the purest form of evil. (It’s leveled out a bit over the years, so it’s tolerable to use these days. Still not a fan though.)
the issue with the terminal is that you can easily fuck up really badly if you don’t know what you’re doing.
the following look the same to a new user:
rcifconfig -r 0 -f puny -l allrctrl -r all -i root -f(both are imaginary made-up comments sothat you cannot just say "oh well obviously one does this and the other one does that)
then one goes on to nuke your home directory while the other one restarts the wifi adapter.
(and this can actually happen in practice. consider all the “always remove the french language pack” jokes that has been going around for years.)
for graphical user interfaces, you typically have icons to help you give a sense of what it’s doing, typically warning signs before you do anything dangerous, etc.
I’ve heard the jokes about
rm -rf /. I’ve never met anybody who’s taken it seriously and nuked their system.That command is legendary. It’s one of the first bits of computer lore I ever learned, about 10 years before I ever touched Linux. In fact, at that time I knew two things about Linux: it’s a free OS and don’t do
rm -rf /.Of course you should do some research first, so that you’re sure that you know what a command does, but if you’re getting it from a forum like Stack Overflow or even reddit, you can be reasonably sure that if the commenter was trying to destroy your computer they’d get downvoted and one of the other commenters would warn you about it. Don’t treat Linux like it’s some kind of minefield that you have to tiptoe around. It isn’t conducive to learning.
