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I’d say the ideal situation is that tools are developed library first, then cli or gui as preferred allowing others to pick up the slack and make the other tool (or tools) using the functions in the library.
One of the reasons automation is so much easier on linux than windows is because there are many more cli tools to do things. On windows many tools are gui first and cannot easily be automated.
You can’t copy and paste into a GUI, and it’s painful to help people to use them.
So you want newbies blindly entering scripts to there command line and not knowing what that are doing.
If it’s “oh, you can open up [application X] and it’s easy to figure it out, and there’s videos out there to cover your use case”, then ok.
But if it’s to help a user with a very specific task and they want their hand held, well from a GUI perspective I’m either making a bunch of screenshots or maybe even a tutorial video or a screen share session… Or I shoot them a relatively short CLI command that does it and move on to other things.
It is usually much shorter to tell someone the CLI to do something than it is to try to train them on a GUI for the same thing. If it’s well-trodden subject matter, well they probably already found a youtube tutorial and didn’t even have to ask.
And where a typo can cause a catastrophic outcome
their* they/those*
They’re blindly doing it either way. I understand and want GUIs as well, but dumping commands into terminal is starting to seem easier than “go here click this, now click that”
Open “app” -> open menu -> select option -> change this / push this button.
Just as easy to write as a command. But many people (me included) is so used to go the CLI route that the GUI way is only an afterthought.
Just as easy to write as a command.
No. First you, the helper, have to find the option in the gui. Then you have to look up every step in the path through the gui. At every step you have to find the english name for the button/menu (localization exists), and manually type it (because you can’t select and copy the text of the gui (by default at least)). Also just referring to buttons by name sometimes won’t work. It is so cumbersome.
I can’t find this menu, where is it?
Now you have to go figure out what they’re actually looking at and whether it’s what you said to do or not. Command line copy-paste removes any uncertainty.
Teach them to double check against the man page before pasting, would be my guess.
But then the CLI wouldn’t be faster anymore and the whole argument most people keep bringing up falls apart.
Also those man pages aren’t even remotely written to be understandable by Linux novices most of the time…
But then the CLI wouldn’t be faster anymore and the whole argument most people keep bringing up falls apart.
It is much faster for the one giving the answer. Also, the looking up the man page is something you only do the first time. With the gui the user should also verify before blindly following instructions, but it is usually harder to find proper documentation of gui features than cli commands.
Also those man pages aren’t even remotely written to be understandable by Linux novices most of the time…
That is a fair point. They are dense, technical and at times pretty hard to read. But when a novice asks for help they are always going to either trust blindly or verify. Verifying can be a difficult task for a novice no matter if gui or cli is suggested. I do think most novices would trust the gui way more and feel more in control of it, even if they are basically doing the same thing.
Yep, this is just one factor. It’s difficult for people not to judge a book by its cover.
Correctly done, cli is superior for a lot of things.
basic_task_list = ['copy and paste', 'install package', 'type', 'keyboard', 'read and write' ] for basic_task in basic_task_list: print(f""" Newbies can't {basic_task}. They never {basic_task} in windows. Windows has replaced {basic_task} with copilot, this is what linux needs to do to compete. How will linux ever hope to attract windows user if it still maintains this ancient hacker 1337xor tools like {basic_task}? Users just want to turn on computer and watch it do computance - how does linux not get this? """)What’s easier to support?
"Ok, open app commandX,
now click on the button labeled Y… It’s just there, just below your mouse cur… oh now you’ve moved your mouse… no, not there, it’s more to the left, up a bit… down a bit, it’s labeled Y. Third one from the top.
Yes, that’s the one, now click it.
ok, in this pop up you type "super secret code thing’,
no, capitalization doesn’t matter.
Yes. I’ll spell it “s u p e r {space} s e c r e t {space} c o” what do you mean, you don’t have a T on your keyboard? "Or. “Open up the terminal and type this code: commandX --CodeY This will do XYZ. After it’s done, can you tell me the error it says on the screen?”
But yes, I agree, the GUI looks nicer.
Exactly. You can tell someone to type a command, and ask for the output. Otherwise you’re spending 90% of your time asking someone to explain what they see, and searching for buttons that just move around from week to week.
I dgaf about support. (i’m naturally perky).
Back in dos there was a systemic encouragement to users to at least learn something about a computer. Nowadays windows apologists seem to relish how much it dumbs down computers, (or any over supported system).
They won’t learn to ride the bike until someone removes the stabiliser brackets - and Gates is one of the cunts who figured out that he makes more cash by welding them on.
Or pipe GUI output into another GUI function.
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Tbf cli help is copy paste, GUI help is something I didn’t want to help with even when I was being paid for it
I’ve been in a situation like this recently and all I can say is that the CLI is universal.
Yes, it is complex. Yes, it is challenging. But it gets things done.
Don’t be afraid.
Also, GUI changes faster than CLI, CLI has ALWAYS more options, and you can save those commands to a file.
Also can get explanations for every command.
It’s not even that complex, it just looks that way if you’re not used to using it
It isn’t, I admit. But the first impression is intimidating.
I know what you mean, just beware: in lots of cases it’s not as universal (as in distro-independent) as some still think it is.
For people who want to get things done with their PC that isn’t inherently IT-related (like, doing office work or music production or anything else) and just need to do the occasional light sysadmin thing like setting up new drives to be auto-mounted somewhere, pointing to GUI tools is just so much better. And in many cases it is also safer (making your system fail on boot with a small typo in the fstab is painfully easy).
I get where you’re coming from. But as something of an enthusiast myself I don’t always know GUI tools for all the tasks I can do in a terminal. Edit: typos
True.
As someone that started in Linux, for real, with Debian, and in a time that I had to mannually install my graphics card, I learned the way I did things on Debian was significantly different from things got done on other distro families. That, alone, kept faithful to the Debian tree.
Yeah, I’m with you. I fucked up my Deb install because I strayed from “doing things the debian way” and overtinkering with things I wasn’t meant to do.
But compared to other distros, debian feels like a bomb bunker; once you set it up, it’s going to stay set up.
Monolith is a word that fits Debian very well.
It’s like a landmark. It just exists and reality itself seems to bend around it.
I ran a Debian machine, a laptop, until the hardware literally gave up. Eight years of solid service. Regular updates and one reinstall to move to the next version.
It kept working. It kept playing music, playing videos, managing my office needs, surfing the web and receiving my email. Flawlessly.
It outperformed newer machines in its last years and people could not wrap their heads around the notion.
Debian, as a Linux+FOSS combo is a winner combo
I know what you mean, just beware: in lots of cases it’s not as universal (as in distro-independent) as some still think it is.
This is especially true when we start talking about BSDs and other non-GNU platforms.
Unfortunately for newbies and GUI tool developers, I rarely use GUI tools and thus don’t know of many. I do agree that GUI tools have better accessibility and discoverability, but they also have worse performance and are just generally more work to make and thus many developers of enthusiast tools skip the GUI.
Yes. I do tell my newbie friends about any graphical options I am aware of.
Then they ask, “Thank you. Does it work well?”.
And I admit, “I have no idea. I just use the command line.”
Then they paste command I shared into the terminal and watch it finish successfully before the graphical tool has finished downloading.
The issue I have with GUI and wrapper tools on Linux is that I don’t know how they have implemented the standards, I know several tools that only deals with the basic stuff and leave you high and dry for the advanced stuff.
Which I feel is missing the point, if you have a gui it should support advanced stuff as well as the basic stuff, else you will train your self wrong, and have to unlearn a lot of crap
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I just don’t know about the GUI tools and wouldn’t know how to help people with them. Of course I’m not really enthusiast grade anymore and don’t offer Linux help but yeah.
I finally got Docker Desktop to work over the weekend, after months of not being able to sign in - from a browser or CLI.
Some GUIs are nice. I prefer GUIs to CLI. But some GUIs aren’t as usable as CLI
You are not alone. It also took me months to sign in.
I like using Podman Desktop to keep an eye on containers and glance at logs, but more often than not I’m doing most operations on the CLI.
It’s unlikely I will use your “accessible” GUI tools, but I applaud you for making them, even if they’re shit. It’s like art, the more art there is, the better the world is, even if I personally can’t appreciate some of it, I acknowledge the greatness if it’s existence.
ffmpeg is great, and doing simple things is pretty straightforward, but if you work with a lot of media and do different kinds of operations, give Shutter Encoder a shot, it’s an amazing FOSS GUI tool for ffmpeg, yt-dlp, and more!
ffmpeg ❌
ffmpreg ✔️
Interesting. Their website would make me run away fearing it’s from a cheap fake download button scam from ten years ago, but the software itself looks pretty legit.
LOL I found the github page before the website when I discovered it. So many folks mention Handbrake, but after canceling my Adobe subscription, using this was the first time I wasn’t missing Adobe Media Encoder.
I find it’s the GUI tools that are usually cryptic, especially when you want to do more than the most basic operations.
A lot of devs don’t put much work into planning the flow of their GUI from a user’s perspective and it really shows.
IMHO a UI should offer everything a user can do in a given moment, readily available, nothing hidden behind more than a single menu. If something isn’t currently possible, it shouldn’t be available, and if the dev chooses to make the option visible but unavailable, it should be clearly and visibly marked as something that can be available (grayed out text for example).
I think devs tend to overestimate both the skill of the user, and the usefulness of their UI.
a UI should offer everything a user can do in a given moment, readily available, nothing hidden behind more than a single menu.
That would be a nightmare for any sufficiently complex software. Can you imagine how dense the UI would need to be for something like Blender or even Excel if literally every possible option of “things available to do right now” had to be at most two clicks away?
Bud theres obviously exceptions for massive suites like that. But I’m talking about apps with built in UIs that the dev clearly threw together as a last minute thought. Apps with every single thing you could possibly have to do either burried deep in 10k submenus, or hastily packed onto a window.
All I’m saying is there should be a clear and obvious workflow. Devs shouldn’t be afraid to say “I know better than you, do it this way”. Throwing every single tool on a toolbar like with Office suites or editing suites is awful IMO. Gimme menus, but gimme menus that make sense (looking at you Microsoft)
Anyway, you can disagree with me, and it won’t ever effect you, that’s the beautiful thing about the open software world. My opinions can be total shit, and you get to just ignore them 🥰
Sorry for rambling, I’m losing my mind a little bit more every day 🫡
I don’t really disagree, at least in principle. You’re absolutely correct that workflows should be clear and developers often do not make good UI/UX. You just didn’t really qualify your original statement with any of that and made it an absolute, but you’ve clarified now and I’m pretty sure we agree.
For excel as an example isnt it already like that? One click to the ribbon/menu, one click to the option, and maybe a 3rd if that option had a nuance dropdown
That’s when you go to alternativeto.net and get a different one. If you’re running into that problem then you just are using the wrong tools.
We’re talking about programs that are equally useful in both GUI and CLI, we’re not talking about libre office which is necessarily complex or a video editing program with a thousand transitions. Those are always going to be cryptic and always going to be GUI.
The problem with CLI is it can’t be made easier with a different interface.
Nobara driver installer and disk auto mount GUI <3
Does it really have it’s own thing for auto mounting drives? Cause you can use Gnome Disks or KDE Partition Manger for that, which both offer a nice GUI for that.
I don’t need someone else to make a gui to enter commands for me.
