The command line allows people to help troubleshoot problems across Linux dostros without everyone's desktop having to look exactly the same.
Stop whining, you ninnies, it's a good thing!
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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Ah, the classic "CLI commands are universal" nonsense. Isn't even true with poweruser distros (look at Alpine or Nix), but neither with common ones. But I'm sure reinstalling grub on a systemd-boot distro can't be that bad, right? Here, quickly install something to fix that. Oh, your distro doesn't apt but pacman/dnf/zypper/whatever? Too bad, don't know those. Wait, why is that config file missing? Oh, your distro saves it somewhere else, sure hope you didn't copy some script from the internet that now failed halfway through!
Surely after copy-pasting all those commands the other person has learned something to help themselves next time, other than that they're utterly lost on Linux without the help of others. This will definitely make people use Linux instead of going back to the exploitative OS they know where they at least feel comfortable enough to know it won't fail on them.
I have fixed loads & loads of issues via cli. I don't even know what the hell you're on about. Sounds like a skill issue, tbh.
Copy-pasting commands from search results instead of learning how the applications installed on their machine work. It's a lot deeper than skill issue...
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I learned the command line on Sun Solaris Unix in the 90s, after messing with DOS first. At work I have a terminal open all the time, though I'll use GUI versions of some things too.
I use mint btw.
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Eh. I'm mostly a power user, all day at work in terminals and keyboard shortcut galore.
It doesn't prevent me from laying back and running a "filthy casual" kubuntu with little to no setup at all. At one point you reach the state where you just want to use your computer, not tinker with it all the time.
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I've been using Linux for almost 20 years, but I still remember the fear of the terminal. The truth is that there is not much that you need to learn for daily use. Unless I'm working on an actual project (like configuring servers/networking) I don't spend much time in a CLI. Start with a beginner friendly distro (Linux Mint Debian Edition is my pick). You shouldn't need terminal at all for basic usage. Next, find some tutorials on basic Linux terminal usage and practice. The goal isn't to "learn every command" but to just familiarize yourself with how it works. Learn how to navigate your files and folders (ls, cp, mv, touch, etc). Learn how to edit text files (use nano). After that, anything you need to learn will be because you want to do something beyond basic use.
The year of linux will never come because a lot of people wanna boot up their pc and have it work. Just fire up a program and have work, without looking up workarounds and clis and other stuff.
I made the jump just this month but i can totally understand if someone doesnt wanna do this.
There's a lot of work being poured into Flatpak, which is the way to go forward (most likely coupled with immutable file systems in the future). If this work is done as well as more people contributing to the big desktop environments as Linux becomes gradually more popular there's a good chance we'll see steady success.
But even then this whole culture has to change, and people need to stop lying to themselves how "CLI commands are universal" and such stuff (there are way too many differences between distros). Anyone who, instead of pointing to the corresponding disk utility, by default starts to describe parted or /etc/fstab to people who didn't asked for the harder CLI way is actively alienating people. Not to mention who, in utter unhelpfulness, respond with "why would you want to do that" or "RTFM". As if that'll help anyone (also the manuals are utter garbage as they're almost always written using high-level terminology expecting knowledge no newcomer will understand).
It's indeed "alles extrem belastend".
It is really only a meme
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My dad who retires today and who has been a Windows user since roughly 1993 has set up multiple Pi-Holes and OpenVPN in the last few years and recently even installed Ubuntu in WSL so he can run bash scripts locally too. He's not in a tech job, he's a doctor.
A year ago my friend who has been using Windows for his gaming for the last 22 years asked my to help him set up a Fedora dual boot. Just to play around with, even though he doesn't have a tech background. He didn't really use it much. But today his work had him blocked by their own fuck-up and he decided to use the time to try it out again.
This evening he told me about how he upgraded his Fedora back to a current version using GUI tools. Then he saw that Windows wasn't the default boot in his grub boot order anymore. He tried to find an app for editing grub, realised this was the kind of thing people do with CLI. So in the next two hours he learned enough CLI using a free beginners lesson he found online somewhere, until he found the history command, where he found the grub command we used during the original setup. He was so excited about this success!
I think the CLI criticisms are way overblown, and non-programmers can use CLIs perfectly well if they want to.
I think people have trama from Windows CMD and DOS
It is much nicer these days
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half of the time the people who swear by clis and attack people who prefer a gui can't tell me what a given command is without pressing the up arrow 50 times first
Amateurs use the up arrow. The real pros use history | grep 'something I remember from the command statement' :)
Ctrl+r surely
Next time, tell them, they should install fish and starship
Ctrl+r to reverse search or use atuin shell history.
But no comment otherwise :P.
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I think it's fine to have some less commonly used actions be only accessible through a terminal, even on more user-friendly distros. That is basically what Minecraft does, and yet no one's scared of that.
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BTW, yast exists. I use it if I'm to lazy to research how stuff works.
I just installed Tumbleweed on my laptop alongside my main install (arch btw) to try it out, but I haven't had a chance to mess with yast yet.
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I'm of the opinion that if you're a newbie to Linux and want to use a more GUI-centric distro, then be my guest, telling someone to jump straight into something like Arch when they're just ditching Windows for the first time is more likely to just turn them off Linux forever.
That said, as said newbie gets more comfortable with the terminal, Arch is there if they want more of a challenge, and even then with archinstall, the main difficult part is effectively nullified, although for more advanced, long-term users, fully manual installation is still there on the Arch ISO as an option, but I'd be more likely to point them to something like Debian or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed to start with as those are generally more beginner-friendly than Arch is.
It's not either-or. You can install KDE on Arch with one button in the archinstall you mentioned, and it will be a GUI based distro, you can happily live moving your mouse around the coloured buttons if that's your fancy.
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