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Nah
- CLI is relatively consistent, UIs keep changing; documentation on how to do X will be outdated extremely quickly and unlike CLI those changes aren’t documented nor searchable
- GUIs are straight up not documented, you can’t know an option exists unless you stumble on it
- Even if the GUI is explicit enough to count as documentation, you can’t search a GUI; the CLI documention can be searched for keywords
- You can’t automate GUIs if the need arises
I’m not against GUIs in general, but they should always be supplementary to CLI, otherwise you end up with windows
otherwise you end up with windows
Windows without the garbage? I’m okay with that.
No, Windows as in “this setting is hidden under this menu, that submenu, here click to open another sub-window…”. This will happen any time a dev tries to arrange settings in logical way (instead of flat list of toggle and input boxes), because “logically belong together” and “actually often used together or one after another” are not the same, and also dev logic, internal system logic and user logic are also three different things. Result - mad maze
Which is why many tinkerers like CLI - at least one can run
man somethingorsomething --helpin most casesI feel like a dinosaur at work because many times I have no idea how to use the different programs there, mostly because everything is so incoherent (to me).
And I don’t mean a large living dinosaur cracking trees in two while chasing my dinner.
I mean a bunch of sad brown bones held up by sticks in a dusty museum everyone walks by.
I blame absolutely nobody for wanting a GUI tool for things. But the idea others are at fault for being hesitant or unfamiliar with the tool is also disingenuous, especially when the GUI just adds another layer of abstraction to the tool while removing some of the functionality (as GUI tools often do).
It’s like you’re learning to ride a bicycle. I get that you like the training wheels and they are extremely useful for you, and more experienced cyclists SHOULD be understanding and accommodating, but they can also see the ways they’re holding you back, and it’s natural for them to want you to take them off as soon as possible.
Also, CLI is consistent across any distro… GUI tools, however, vary depending on your desktop environment, distro, version…
You can copy-paste commands tho. Writing a concuse GUI tutorial is more work. Whether I want to do that depends a lot on who that work is for
I’m a big fan of Mint specifically because they spent so much effort making just about everything accessible from a user friendly GUI. I totally agree with you, every time I see this kind of thing online I die a little.
Most people don’t want to become an expert in the task they want to do. They just want to do it once. CLI tools demand expertise.
Unfortunately in Linux, UI tools often take away some of the transparency you get with the CLI tools they’re made for.
I’ve recently tried setting up a VPN connection to my workplace using the EndeavourOS configuration UI. It basically just said “can’t connect, haha, fuck you”, so I had to dig deeper. Finding out how to use the CLI commands necessary to identify and fix the problem took some time and effort, but in the end, I managed to set it up successfully (turned out most Windows admins still think l2tp is hot shit while the Linux world considers it obsolete).
In this case, UI wasn’t as user friendly as CLI, because it hid vital information that was necessary to solve the problem.
A better UI would probably have solved that problem quicker and easier. In an ideal world, you get intuitive GUI tools that cover all use cases and you still have the option to use the CLI if you want to dig deeper. So yeah, I agree with the point you’re making - Mint trying to be as user friendly as possible by offering accessible UI tools is a good thing and one of the reasons why Mint is so popular. (It’s also a reason why Windows sucks ass, because for most UI things the CLI equivalent is either non-existent or cryptic as hell…)
The point I’m making - GUI tools should always try and make using the CLI unnecessary. Taking away complexity without taking away functionality is the key, and as a consequence, those GUI tools will not be underappreciated for sure.
You should open a bug report saying that the GUI hid the error from you. That’s a problem.
I’m glad we’re in agreement.
It all comes down to how complete and good the tool is, both for CLI and for GUI. I’ve seen GUI tools that give more information than the equivalent CLI, and of course I’ve also seen the opposite as you have.
What grinds my gears the most though is when there’s no tool at all, you need to edit some config file, and the instructions given are
nano /path/file.conf(or, god forbid, vim). It’s a text editor, why not use a normal one?! There are no guardrails either way to ensure the format is correct!Obviously in that scenario someone should make an interface to edit the config safely, be it GUI or CLI, but that’s another matter.
Speaking of which, the latest Mint released ~yesterday added a GUI to make common edits to the grub bootloader. See: https://www.linuxmint.com/rel_zena_whatsnew.php “System Administration”. I am not aware of any CLI that can do this, I think before this you had to edit a text file and hope you got it right. At least as far as common recommendations go.
I agree on CLI text editors. I get why they exist, but for most users they should be a last resort, not the primary instruction.
Instead of telling people to use Nano, just tell people to edit the .conf in a text editor and let them choose!
Many users won’t understand that what they’re being told to do with Nano is literally just edit a text document with a funky file extension, and that they don’t actually have to that it in CLI (in-fact it might even be easier not to if you’re not familiar with them).
I’ve noticed this problem as well, as a Linux novice. I stick mostly to GUIs, but a few times I’ve had to figure out the command line equivalent for whatever I’m trying to do because the gui program would just close and provide no further feedback. Then I get to the same step in the command line and it gives me a whole paragraph of explanation about why it failed and how I can fix it. This info should’ve been available in the gui version, maybe like a popup error message in windows
“accessible GUI tools” be like
Windows registry is an absolute horror show even without the GUI lmao.
At least on linux you will usually be greeted by a nice integrated GTK or Qt layout.
Windows is 40% archaic stuff from the 90s, 40% tirefire PWA/electron apps, and 20% of normal design that keeps them barely ahead of OSX.
20% of normal design that keeps them barely ahead of OSX.
Where does one find this 20%?
That’s just dishonest.
Honestly, Windows MMC tools are one of the oldest and most dependable ways to:
Manage printers
View logs
Manage devices and drivers
Manage group policy
Manage MDT
The interface is almost 30 years old and it is prone to crash. Microsoft cannot seem to rewrite tools that replace the snap-ins.
There are some alternatives, such as diskpart to replace diskmanagement, but nobody is talking about replacing devmgmt with PowerShell or regedit with PowerShell for reg commands for the one off or the lay user.
Also, attempting to duplicate printmanagement with devices and printers has resulted in a loss of functionality for managing printer ports and drivers. Attempting to manage printers through just PowerShell is pure madness as you can’t properly parse the vendor options.
If you have made it this far, thank you for hearing me out. I’m not sure I actually made a point, but I do feel better.
There are already PowerShell commands for reading searching and updating registry entries. I don’t think anyone is replacing one with the other, though.
Devices and Printers in Windows can go to hell where it belongs.
I guess I wasn’t clear. The average Windows user isn’t aware of PowerShell and would hardly be able to use reg itself. I agree that it is a great tool for managing registry in an environment, but I have seen professional technicians darn near cry over using cd to traverse directories.
Watching my team member trouble shoot yesterday. Stops every 20 seconds to look up kubctl commands. After watching painfully for 15 minutes I show them freelens, a kube ide. They said they like command line because nobody using guis know shit. Again, they said this while having to keep the man page open.
I know kube, I wrote small contributions. I just don’t memorize or need every fucking describe out to json command. I have a giant fucking image with green yellow red dots and right click to shell in. I can see every fucking configmanp, namespace, etc on my screen.
Tldr, these folks are morons not good at their job.
Edit: Good Lord, look at the comments 🤣. Thank you fedverse for driving that nail home so perfectly. 2026, year of the Linux desktop.
Same thing with git.
There is no shortage of git beginners that refuse to use a GUI.
They ask for help for something, I haven’t used git CLI in years, so I tell them “go to this place and click those button”, then they open the vscode terminal and ask “but can I do it from CLI?” Okay then I go to search the command. Meanwhile I tell them to checkout a branch or something as basic as that and watch them struggle for way longer than it took me to find the command I was looking for.
I get that thousands of elitists have convinced you that using git from a GUI is a sin. But it’s fine, I won’t tell no one. I use a GUI myself.
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.
And where a typo can cause a catastrophic outcome
Teach them to double check against the man page before pasting, would be my guess.
Or pipe GUI output into another GUI function.
Or
log.txtbasic_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’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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
So… I’m definitely cheering up for the lady in red.
Why? Am I an elitist asshole doing his best to sound smart?
Well yes, definitely BUT I also appreciate the power of the command line. The CLI isn’t “cool” because of the cryptic command, no the CLI is cool because :
- ls (list files)
- ls *.txt (list all files ending with the .txt extension)
- ls *.txt | wc -l (count how of them are)
- etc
and the “etc” is the FUNDAMENTAL part! Namely that no matter how smart the GUI developer is, they can’t predict how it is going to be used when done with OTHER tools. That’s the true power of the CLI. So yes if you stick to a single command, the CLI is unnecessarily cryptic but as soon as you start to combine commands, nothing comes close to it.
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.
If there is a cli variant, why do you feel the need to do the same in a gui, its slower, most of the time far uglier… All in all just not as good as the cli tool
Because using a gui is easier for novices, doesn’t risk fucking up your entire system if you accidentally copy paste a troll answer from Reddit, and doesn’t require you to learn commands by heart if you want to use them repeatedly.
It’s also much easier to understand what you’re doing, if you’re doing it graphically, vs just copy pasting some cryptic command from the internet
Feels fairly obvious tbh…
Your attitude is EXACTLY what makes IT novices afraid of adopting Linux. Because they think, thanks to people like you, that using Linux requires you to be good at using the CLI. But hey, if you want to scare away new users, be my guest.
Keep reinforcing their incorrect assumptions about how hard and complicated Linux adoption is, and push them to stay on Windows. A+ job if that’s what you’re trying.
Spot on.
I think the problem lies in the usage of commands from the internet, if you take a look at the commands, they get very straight forward and easy to use. Also i never said that the commands where hard, or you need to use them. If a newcomer uses a gui its fine, but for the most power, and least resources, the cli is, ans will always be, the best.
The whole point of the post is that because users like you only ever give answers in terms of CLI commands, novice users probably don’t even realise how many GUI options there are.
Obviously CLI is faster and more powerful, literally no one ever argued it wasn’t, but it’s also less intuitive and harder to understand than GUI interactions (there’s a reason why people on Windows tend to use the GUI options and not do everything with the CLI), and for novice users, that this meme is explicitly talking about, that ease of use and understanding is far, far more important than the benefits of CLI.
I see your point there, but it is just far easier to give an answer in command form, than telling people where to click on a GUI.
But i do understand what you are saying, and i cant argue with it. GUI tools are good for early users, and those who dont want to use the CLI. CLI is better for those who want/need that extra power.
There was a whole team of “engineers” that once told me, “using infrastructure as Code obfuscates things, using the GUI allows us to see exactly what is happening!”
They did not appreciate it when I told them to “git gud, or GTFO”.
Subsequently the company hired 5 more automation engineers like me and the two dozen of ClickOps “engineers” were let go. Our productivity is even higher with the 6 of us compared to more than two dozen of them.
GUI is nice for hobbyists and mainstream consumers.
GUI enables high level view and inspection of large data sets. I ain’t reading Mona Lisa byte by byte.
Don’t know what using infrastructure as code is supposed to mean.
Don’t know what using infrastructure as code is supposed to mean.
It’s not “supposed” to mean anything. It’s a well defined and commonly used term you can easily find on a search engine.
Config file setups. Makes sense. Didn’t know that term for that very simple thing. Could have been less rude.
We both know the “supposed to mean” comment was the rude thing to say here. And no, your summary isn’t nearly as accurate as “infrastructure as code”.
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
