You must log in or register to comment.
Perception: “the CLI is scary and hard to use” Reality: “computer, install gimp” “yessir, that’ll be 141MB, is that okay?”
Unless you use Fedora, because I have decided that dnf stands for “do not fucking” so you tell your computer do not fucking install Firefox and then it does it anyway because it has Authority issues
That didn’t work. I got
computer: Command not found
That is an oversimplification and you know it. Why is it so hard for CLI people to be honest?
Installing software on the command line is often a nightmare, requiring multiple commands and throwing error messages that you can only find mention of in one unresolved thread on some obscure forum somewhere.
Plus, there are so many different commands that you have other CLI users saying that they need to pull up reference tools to remember how to do different actions. I have only ever needed to that once or twice ever for GUIs.
Get real.
Winget installwinget searchwinget upgrade --all --silentOh look, its also super easy in Windowsland!
Installing software on the command line is often a nightmare
In my experience, installers are often a nightmare.
For me, GUI vs CLI have about the same failure rate (for their operating system).
But I appreciate that the CLI version gives me a message I can search for instead of a “fuck you buddy” pop up box with an “ok” button.
Edit: There’s one case where I have a much harder time with CLI installs - when there’s only a CLI “installer” available. I don’t blame the CLI for that, I blame the person who shares seven CLI commands instead of writing an installer.
Uhhh, maybe if we are talking about back in like 2001?
I literally manage a fleet of linux end user machines and i can’t remember the last time installing software was more than just "pacman -Syu <nameofprogram> (yes they run arch BTW)
Why are anti cli people so dishonest about how hard it is? Now, if you are trying to get involved in like machine learning or something then yes that’s an absolute nightmare of errors and installing python packages and other nonsense but that’s true no matter what platform you’re on and whether you have a GUI or not. Even all the fancy gui installers for stuff like stable diffusion are a constant nightmares of I’m not working because fuck you that’s not unique to cli
Why is it so hard for CLI people to be honest?
Interesting if unseemly glimpse into your psyche.
Nah I don’t know it, cause that’s not been my experience. But admittedly my experience is also pretty limited so maybe I’ve just yet to run into this myself. I’m just a general use case desktop PC user not doing anything particularly technical.
sudo zypper install programname
sudo zypper remove programname
or
sudo flatpak install programname
sudo flatpak uninstall programname
Doesn’t get more complicated than that.
And for updates
sudo zypper refresh
sudo zypper update
sudo flatpak update
Much faster than opening a GUI, and it didn’t take long for me to remember the commands.
CLI is effective because every command serves a specific purpose. UIs are the opposite, you have to imagine all possible intentions the user could have at any given point and then indicate possible actions, intuitively block impossible actions, and recover from pretty much any error.
CLI is effective also because of its history (i.e. one can go back, repeat a command as-is or edit it then repeat) but also the composability of its components. If one made a useful command before, it can be combined with another useful command.
Rinse & repeat and it makes for a very powerful tool.
The Unix principle of piping between two or even multiple programs, together with “all data should be in the simplest common format possible” (that is, largely unformatted strings), was a really clever invention to be popularized. As proven by the fact it is still so useful decades later on a myriad of computers unimaginably more powerful than what they had back then.
It’s not perfect by any means (alternative title: why something like Nushell exists), but it’s pretty good all things considered I dare say.
Absolutely. I learned about that decades ago as a teenager and never would I have thought it would still be useful today… yet, in 2025 if you want to do anything powerful, in the cloud, on your phone, even in your XR headset, it is STILL relevant!
PS: I project I’m contributing to on the topic https://nlnet.nl/project/xrsh/ ideas welcomed!
There is nothing productive about searching online for some stupid command that is outdated for 2 years, breaks some shit and then you need another 2 hours to unfuck it because it’s not obvious from the long noodle of a command how to revert it. For something that could just be 3 clicks through control panel that every idiot could navigate without having to use online search engine.
Go to a free online AI (or run one locally) and ask it your Linux questions.
That way you won’t have to dig around old forums for answers.
this method saved me years of useless search for real
Why are you entering commands that you read about online without knowing what they do? There’s a running joke that you need to enter
rm -fr /to remove the French language from your system; it actually wipes the entire disk mounted to/.When you know what the commands do, using the terminal is always going to be faster (i.e., more productive) and use fewer system resources than using a GUI. That’s just a fact, sorry if it annoys you when people point it out. Whenever I need to move a lot of stuff around, I will always use
mvinstead of Thunar (my file manager) even though I prefer a GUI for most tasks.There are two different “efficiency” and “simplicity” perspectives clashing here. If you already are proficient with the CLI it’s arguably more efficient and/or simple than GUI solutions. If you are not then there’s literally a steep learning cliff in front of you, something many in the first group apparently either forget or otherwise want to ignore. It just sucks, some people in the community do have a lot of knowledge but a complete lack of understanding for people outside of their tech bubble.
So, I wonder what happens if we ad a ln option for every single one of those tasks in the UI? O right!
msvc.exe is calling!
I agree. For regular user facing tasks, the terminal should be a last resort. I say this as someone who will happily defer to the terminal if I need more advanced control. But when basic configuration is subject to just CLI, it’s not as accessible as it could or should be
You’re the type of guy we’re making fun of btw
It’s not the own you think it is…
Most cli tools have a -h or a tldr entry.
Or a man page
Bold of you to assume that someone struggling with basic cli tools would read a man page.
sudo aptitude reinstall '~i'I feel like a lot more people be comfortable using the terminal if the text displayed when it was first opened gave you a list of commands to try. There is a very steep initial learning curve immediately which discourages experimentation, and I think that with a little bit of effort you could get a lot of people over that hump and then they could enjoy terminal Bliss.
Just the other day, I was trying to run a CLI program, one I won’t name.
I’m trying out a new immutable distro, and couldn’t install it, so I said hey these new flatpaks are supposed to be all a guy could ever need.
So I downloaded an app that uses this unnamed CLI program as its core. It was a GUI app. And while it worked just fine, I also had very little control over what exactly was gonna happen and how it would happen. I wanted to do some specific things I knew the core program could do, but there was no way to do it.
Eventually I dug deeper and realized I’m an idiot and the CLI program can run without installing it or any dependencies, so it was fine to use natively. I was able to accomplish my task quickly and efficiently after that, happy as a clam.
CLI and GUI both have their place. I prefer GUI most the time, honestly. But having some CLI chops can be extremely useful at times.
GUI is a generic swiss army knife. It’s easy to introduce to someone, and it has a whole array of tools ready for use. However, each of those tools is only half-decent at its job at best, and all of the tools are unwieldy. The manual is included, but it mostly tells you how to do things that are pretty obvious.
CLI is a toolbox full of quality tools and gadgets. Most people who open the box for the first time don’t even know which tools they’re looking for. In addition, each tool has a set of instructions that must be followed to a T. Those who know how to use the tools can get things done super quickly, but those who don’t know will inevitably cause some problems. Oh, but the high-detail manuals for all the tools are in the side compartment of the toolbox too.
People can do whatever they like, and heck I find CLI intimidating sometimes, but I’m always learning something new a little bit at a time.
I’m tired of seeing it in every field of interest that has any kind of payoff, whether art or FOSS.
“I’m [(almost always) a guy] who (maybe has kids and) has a job. I stopped learning anything after I got my job-paper / degree / highschool diploma. I shouldn’t have to learn anything anymore. I am happy to shell out disposable sad-salary-man money (and maybe my soul idk) to any mega-corp that offers me a “create desired outcome button” without me having to think too much. It’s [current year]! I shouldn’t have to think anymore! Therefore Linux is super behind and only for nerds and I desire its benefits so much that I leave this complaint anywhere these folks gather so they know what I deserve.”
Agh. I gotta go before this rant gets too long lol
Isn’t this what ctrl+r is for? 😅
Fucking terminal, in many of them ctrl+c and ctrl+v don’t even work. and don’t get me started on how they implement ctrl+z. I’m waiting for a terminal to have the ms-office ribbon menu bar before I’ll use it.
I am almost afraid to say it, but I’m confident someone out there has created such a cursed terminal. The modern word ribbon does not match the windows XP theme, though :(
For anyone having the copy-paste skill issue, try
Ctrl+Shift+CandCtrl+Shift+V.
My guy, it’s because you’re the vegans of tech.
Nobody cares. It doesn’t need to be your personality.
Noooo, you cannot have a consistent UI/UX experience across platforms with decades old commands and tools, my imaginary grandma might get confused, also you need three IT degrees to type “man command” into a term window.
Tbf, most man files are not easy to understand. Between man, tldr, ArchWiki, and an occasional O’Reilly book I can usually get things done, but documentation on Linux still has a lot of room for improvement.
Other than stuff like
ffmpeg- which has so many features that a man page just can’t cut it; andsed- which doesn’t have a simple hyperlink saying “you go here to learn sed regexp”, most man pages do what I need them to do.You just need to learn the basics of how the man page is organised and what the brackets in the SYNOPSIS section mean and that makes using them much easier.
We also have
man manfor that purpose.I don’t think you get what I mean.
I don’t mean that man itself isn’t functional, I mean the way most man pages are written isn’t clear enough to communicate how to use the programs they refer to.
I’d include the man page for man in that, and I’d encourage anyone else to look at it from the eyes of someone who can follow written instructions and ask “How does this manual/help file compare to others I have read?”.
So, for example, in the examples, it says:
man -a intro Display, in succession, all of the available intro manual pages contained within the manual. It is possible to quit between successive displays or skip any of them.
Those two lines are the only place within man’s man page (at least the one you get from man man) that use the string “intro”. What is an intro in this context? Guess you got to run it to find out.
What is -a for? About 200+ lines down there is a two sentence explanation.
The first sentence tells you how man normally behaves, saying: “By default, man will exit after displaying the most suitable manual page it finds.” This sentence is unclear (“When does man exit after displaying the most suitable manual page it finds? When I run man ls I see the manual for ls on my screen until I press ‘q’ to ‘quit’ out of it.”) and not immediately connected to the purpose of the flag/option.
The second sentence says: “Using this option forces man to display all the manual pages with names that match the search criteria.” This is a lot clearer, and my only complaint about it can be that it’s not the first sentence in the explanation.
Yeah, one big problem of
manI found was the severe lack of explanation of what the command is mainly intended to do. It’s as if the user is expected to run themanafter knowing what purpose a specific program exists for, which, I guess is what it is intended for. I tend to rely on the package manager’s information and other similar sources for that information andmanmainly for determining the exact usage.I don’t at all expect
manto be useful for someone who can just follow written instructions.
The reason being thanmanis just supposed to tell the user, what typy stuff needs to be done for specific functionality. And most programs tend to be doing some small thingy and not fulfilling the user’s whole requirement in one go.
Meaning, to be happy with justman, one needs to be able to create a solution for themselves by properly fitting little parts and that is already more than half way to being able to do programming.Your
man -a introexample and what followed, made me more confused than before of what you were trying to say, so I am just trying to go with the feel of it for now.Yeah I’m okay with the basic navigation options. The primary point is that man pages do look like they had written by someone who does not do technical writing. Whether that’s someone coming from a law background, programming, or whatever.
It’s not written for an end user who wants to know how to use the tools they have available. It will tell you what a command “does”, sometimes, but it doesn’t explain itself. It presumes a certain amount of pre-existing knowledge, or familiarity with the syntax of man writers.
For another example, the man for ls repeatedly lists options referencing “implied” entries without ever explaining what “implied” means in this context. It presupposes that the reader knows what that term means. I know what an implication is in an English class, and the antonym for “implied” is “explicit”, but in a man page? No clue. Not like there’s reference to or examples of “explicit” entries to contrast with “implied” entries. You just have to know what it means in context, or figure it out some other way.
“man command”
This is why I hate linux, it appeals to the male fantasy !!!
I guess you never heard of the finger command.
“imaginary grandma” is a crazy form of grandparent-denying gaslighting and I will absolutely start using it
It’s more about most people don’t have time to learn all the commands to be a sufficient enough user. I don’t want to dig through an endless stream of AI slop articles hallucinating me the commands I need for something, nor have the time and money to retreat from society “to learn it properly”. Also often the things I do is more intuitive for a button or shortcut press (I have made a card for my keyboard for F-keys) rather than typing in every time the commands.
Going CLI from GUI feels like ripping out the interiors and the dashboard from your car to make it slightly lighter the same way race cars are done, but instead you’re doing it to the family car. Sure, a lot of GUI is now a web app, because some techbro in the 2010’s wanted to
collect our data for advertisement opportunities and creating the Torment Nexusfree us from software installations, so we could just type www . wordprocessor . com into the URL bar of our browser instead of running the spooky and scary wordprocessor.exe after running the even spookier and scarier wordprocessor_install_1_6_5.exe. This in turn lead to a lot of student being over-reliant on HTML-like formatting for UI, and GTK and Qt not being taught in turn, which also could serve as lightweight and mostly cross-platform GUI. I even created my own GUI subsystem in my game engine for its editors.A lot of problems caused by those on the top are being blamed on “normie users”, because we need to be “ideologically neutral”, except when it comes to “supressed” ideologies…
you don’t have to memorize the commands, just use
tldr commandandaproposto your advantage.Everything will seem difficult when you’re not used to it and are changing habit, it’s not just a GUI to CLI thing.
That varies from command to command though.
manis nice if you know how to use the command but have forgotten which option does what you want. But if you have no idea how to use a program, reading e.g.man awkwill not be very helpful
Didn’t even know there were such a thing as evangelists for Windows
Yes it is bad ux/ui but its better than windows regedit or its 20 control panels that don’t do the thing you want, or windows terminal that you use constantly and don’t notice.
T. I did not understand how anyone would like terminal for software and now i swear by my drop down console. But i agree, the few areas of terminal people mostly use should be covered by a gui, eg gnome having “open terminal in folder location” and gnome having ability to add repos to software center like kde.
Due to work environment and me not switching yet (I won’t go to W11,but switching requires a bunch of time investment I haven’t gotten around to yet) I’m mostly working in Windows, but even them I use CLI a ton. Mostly powershell, but there are a lot of cmd commands useful in troubleshooting, and robocopy and other tools are more reliable than their gui counterparts.
