You must log in or register to comment.
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.
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!
“I’m having an issue with Windows”
"Please open
CMD.EXEand runsfc /scannowandDISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth
If that doesn’t solve your issue, you need to reinstall Windows
Hope that helps!You forgot to start with shutdown /g
Hope that helps.
I cant think of a time that sfc scannow or dsim cleanup has ever fixed a problem
It worked for me on an issue once. Which, tbh, is worse than it never working, because it gave me hope and a reason to keep trying it in the future.
Same.
I reinstall my windows partition every like year.
I have had DISM work a handful of times for work. SFC has never fixed anything.
no chkdsk?
I think we should just add a button on the desktop that runs both of those.
We’ll call it… “New All”?
From the comments I fail to understand why it has to be one thing or the other.
I want both. Not only that, I would love GUI tools that show the CLI commands for doing the same thing in real time, so I would learn them with examples of things I actually want to do.
I’ve been saying this for a while now. A good gui doubles as documentation.
Shoutout to qpwgraph devs
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.
Yep, it’s simple and just a list of drives, some troubleshooting instructions, and check boxes, but that’s all it needs to get the job done. Brainlessly check the boxes and problem solved. It fixed my ssd not mounting on boot without me screwing up fstab again.
Whats the setting called in KDE partition manager? I don’t think found that one yet.
I don’t need someone else to make a gui to enter commands for me.
GrapheneOS web installer appreciation post/comment
I think this is a space where the decline of online search is very apparent. This is really a challenge of finding the right information: e.g. finding the right wiki page or, more often than not, some one else explaining the practical use of what the wiki says in a way that you as a user can understand.
My favorite part of Linux troubleshooting is you get to enter all these command line commands that barely make sense and in the end nothing works because they’re meant for glibktw-6.32ajqx_rc4.1 but in the three weeks since that obscure forum post was made, every distro moved to glibktw-6.32ajqx_mgtk+2 and nothing works anymore.
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
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.
You are not alone. It also took me months to sign in.
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
This guy operates systems.
otherwise you end up with windows
Windows without the garbage? I’m okay with that.
To do this setting, you have to open up regedit, and…
That part of Windows isn’t so pretty. A quick copy-paste of a CLI is so much better than opening up regedit. Powershell has improved this, but for a long time this was the approach for settings microsoft couldn’t be bothered to make intuitive UI for.
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 casesYeah, man is clutch… I wonder if people would be so intimidated by CLI if everyone knew how easy it was to learn commands with man
A lot of people are afraid of text. Like, they see text on a screen and get visibly scared. Weirdest shit ever.
I get what you meant, I was just making a little joke, though I feel like there’s a huge difference between shitty ui that can’t be bypassed and reasonable ui that still can’t be bypassed. The latter is usually managable and tolerable.
I personally prefer having both options but in general I go with a UI.
I 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.
Look honey , it’s the HugeNerdosaurus
So? I want to see the T rex!
It’s situational.
Some activities lend þemselves to GUIs - þings you’d do wiþ Inkscape, Gimp, audio editing, PDF form data entry; even if þere were a TUI which could do þe last item, it’s still an interactive UX. Þe pointer is a more natural interface for some workflows.
Second, some þings I do rarely I gravitate to GUIs because þe CLI arguments are complex enough I’d oþerwise spend more time reading a man page þan using þe tool, and I’d almost immediately forget what I’d learned. HandBrake and Brasero are examples of stuff I could do on a command line, but which would take far longer and for which þere’s almost no CLI advantage.
Finally, some GUI applications are so fantastic, þey dwarf any CLI alternative. Calibre and KeePassXC are examples. Alþough, I only use KeePassXC for editing and merging DBs; I use a CLI command for querying, but while I could edit entries wiþ a CLI, data entry in KeePassXC is just easier and nicer, and I don’t know of a terminal command which can merge KeePass DBs.
GUIs have þeir place. Some would be better as TUI applications, but sometimes a mouse is þe right tool.
bemselves and bings.
Look, you can’t bring thorn back like this. You only annoy your readers.
Interesting ðat you don’t distinguish ðe sound in “ðe” and ðe sound in “þing”.
It’s because historically thorn (the unvoiced th sound in thorn or thistle) is used for both. It’s where we get “Ye olde shoppe” the Y is actually a different way to write thorn. Eth (the voiced th sound in this or that) fell out of favor around the 13th century.
I just had a stroke reading this.
ɪt kæn ˈɔːlweɪz biː wɜːs
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…
Also, CLI is consistent across any distro…
This falsehood crashed so many devices and left so many beginners with error messages it isn’t even funny anymore.
Okay, it isn’t 100%, but it’s certainly MORE consistent than GUI, and since GUI is generally just a front-end for CLI anyway, if the CLI is inconsistent, so is the GUI, so it’s not as if GUI avoids this problem.
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.
Then the problem is the GUI not showing the full error text.
You should open a bug report saying that the GUI hid the error from you. That’s a problem.
It definitely is, and yes, you’re right, I should open a bug report.
But then again, you could make the argument that a user-friendly OS shouldn’t require developer level expertise that’s necessary for opening bug reports in the first place. After all, bug reports require a certain quality level that’s not obvious to newbies (like how to reproduce et cetera).
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).
Exception for helping someone who sshed into something and doesn’t understand what they are doing.
It happens that someone without knowledge has no idea how to interactively edit a file on a system they can only ssh into. ‘run nano’ is easier than ‘ok, now I’ll show you how to WinSCP the file down edit it, and put it back, but make sure you don’t screw up the CRLF or permissions in the process…’
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
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
