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those are the people not even liked by lifelong linux users. my grandparents used linux and never touched a terminal. before he was mentally gone my grandpa bet on horses online. Also every gui installer was made by someone not like this.
meanwhile windows you have no choice but to use terminal as well as customized installer image if you want to mitigate the built in spying and use an offline account
Counterpoint: why should the standard for "just works" mean no CLI? What if distro maintainers decide that their user's experience is improved by relegating some tasks to the shell?
Unfortunately I use Windows at work and I constantly use the CLI. I probably use the CLI more on Linux, but I'm generally doing really awesome stuff on Linux and really dumb stuff on Windows.
If you're just a regular chud consumer, then maybe you don't need it on either OS.
I'm pretty comfortable on the command line, but I also won't hesitate to boot a live disk and # dd if=/dev/zero the main hard drive the moment my gui refuses to load.
Yep, same. The main thing Linux has taught me over the years is to keep good, regular backups of everything important.
I've lost way too much data already by fucking up grub somehow, or by accidentally letting windows overwrite the efi partition or some bullshit. I know how to recover from that now, but back in the day when I was doing dumb shit to my os pretty much every day, I didn't.
That was all 100% my own fault btw
The simple mans solution.
Giving the would-be linux newbs the benefit of the doubt, IF they have any terminal experience at all it is with CMD/PowerShell. I don't blame them one bit for wanting to banish all terminals into the shadow realms, they had a traumatic experience.
There's an OS that doesn't require command line use to do anything slightly advanced? That hasn't been my experience.
I just installed garuda and update via their built in update command
If you see having to use the terminal as a failure of the operating system then you shouldn't use Linux
You don't have to live in the terminal, but the amount of people who treat the terminal like it's lava is too damn high.
I am very proficient with the terminal. But there are many use cases when I want a OS that does not need the terminal at all. For instances media dedicated pcs.
I have a pc that I only use from the couch, for playing games a viewing media, and using the terminal from my remote size keyboard is a bore, I would prefer a 100% gui solution for that usage.
For gaming and media consumption, you can run Steam Big Picture Mode or Plex/Jellyfin which are designed for controller use.
But you're not doing system administration with a TV remote on any operating system. By having a system that you can fully control from the terminal, you can just ssh into it to fix any issues without wasting system resources on a GUI that you will rarely use.
Nah, that's wrong.
This is the kind of mindset that prevents mass adoption of Linux. Sure the terminal should be available but there still should be distros catering to less tech-savvy people if we want the year of the Linux desktop to arrive at all. Some governments are looking to replace Windows with Linux, and you cannot expect the average desk worker to know or even care about doing stuff in a terminal.
You don't need to do everything on the terminal -- even today, you don't have to. But you should not fear the terminal, the same way you should not fear a piano because you play a violin. Windows also has a terminal, there's stuff that tells you to go there to enable some Powershel things, and no one complains.
Great comparison, because playing either piano or violin is beyond 99% of all people who just want to listen to music. Common users and office workers have never even heard of Powershell.
You should not have to learn for years before being comfortable using a computer. If everyone has to do that it's not something that will be adopted widely, as we can obviously see with Linux on Desktop. It's both a Software problem (either lack thereof or bad design) as well as a culture problem; the latter is what I criticize, because it's so utterly unnecessary and alienates common people.
And the Windows Shell really isn't comparable, it's 100% optional.
Terminal usage is a tool just like GUI tools, I don't think it's helpful either to preload people with the belief that it's some arcane tool that takes years before you can start using it, like anything you pick it up by doing.
Can't really say it's 100% optional as a blanket case either, heavily depends on a user, my work I've depended on having a terminal for years, and that was even before I moved into SWE, I've seen lots of business developed processes put together as an amalgam of batch files, VBA/VBS, and python because they needed to put something together with what they had rights to.
Be honest that I don't see the terminal as a barrier to Linux anyhow, for the use case of "I browse the internet and use office programs", you absolutely do not need to drop to the CLI, at least not for Debian or Mint, can handle installs and updates through their graphical package managers. Most people probably aren't setting up services or the like on their machines, and if they are they already require terminal usage on any operating system.
Learn for years? Dude you just search on the internet if you need to find out how to do something in the terminal that you don't know how to do. This isn't the 90s where you had to have a bookshelf of technical manuals to install and run your favorite distro.
Then you have the security issue that comes from teaching users they should just trust whatever random people tell them to do when facing an issue with their computer.
You don't need years for a terminal, at least not for the stuff a normal user would have to expect to do with it (so eg.: not browsing files, that has good UIs already). But you should expect to have to learn something. We require people to learn and even certify their learning when they are to drive a car for example, and for computers we are not even askng 1/6th of that, even tho the last few decades show we maybe should.
some linux users dream of having their grandma run linux so they never have to look at windows or macos ever again
That just isn't how novice users interact with a computer, though. Most mainstream OSes have GUI for anything you'd need to do as a novice.
Everything but ffmpeg. ffmpeg was what made me accept (with silent contempt) the Terninal on Windows, fish made me love it on linux
Touching virtual buttons on a multitouch screen wasn't how novice users interacted with a computer until it was.
To me this feels like recommending Android to someone and then people on social media saying that I'm elitist for expecting someone to use a computer with only a touchscreen when everyone knows that you interact with computers with a mouse and keyboard.
I'm not speaking hypothetically, this was the exact argument people were using when smartphones were still nerd toys and not a standard part of human experience. "Nobody will ever use them", "they're too confusing", "typing on a screen is too clunky at least my flip phone has buttons".
People can learn. As soon as the iPhone came out suddenly everyone was capable of using a touchscreen interface and learning a new OS.
Linux isn't for everyone. But if you're going to choose make the leap to Linux, you will be using the terminal occasionally. You don't have to be a terminal-only user, most people use a GUI for daily tasks.
As long as you're okay learning how to do some basic terminal tasks you'll be fine. But if you come into with the mindset that the terminal shouldn't be needed and get upset at people for telling you otherwise, you're going to have a bad time.
The difference is that the touch screen stuff was a more dumbed down experience, not an increase in difficulty and options.
Absolutely! Honestly I feel like human apathy towards leaning new things has increased exponentially over the years. People are thinking less and less, especially with Ai enabling people to put their brain in a jar and forgo critical thinking themselves.
Well yea, Linux is about learning how the computer works; wheras windows wants to hide it
No. This may be the case for some distros like Gentoo or Arch, but applying this to the whole ecosystem and expecting everyone to even be interested in computers (which they should not fucking have to be to use a user-friendly Linux) is what alienates people.
Been using Linux for almost two decades now. Mostly Ubuntu and now recently Linux Mint.
True Linux users build their own kernel and distro from scratch from an environment running directly in EFI
Pff, I carve my own CPUs from compacted sand, like real men.
I don't compile, I flip the CPU instruction switches manually while reading directly from the source code.
