Post

and you can ask for usage and info

Good know! Gonna use a linux distro and desktop soon!

🤷‍♀️ From what I can tell you can use a gui for the most part when it comes to mac os. If one wanted to they could use mac's terminal too. I think mac os is shoving more ai down people's throats so I don't know how users deal with that.

i guess apple has this weird marketing thing going on that positions macs as a thing that is similar to, yet somehow fundamentally different from, A Computer. whereas linux is just something else you can put on a computer so obviously what you're left with is still A Computer

I don't know how to use Mac's file explorer "Finder" I always have to use the terminal to do stuff because it just works

Yeah, most commands are only arcane knowledge until you check the -help flag.

macs are also debugged easiest with the terminal but they dodge the scawwy cli problem by having laypeople drive out to """genius bars""" to do any basic troubleshooting so the wall is maintained.

i think you may have meant to reply with this to someone who said that

manually typing the commands ain't gonna provide any protection from anyone telling you how to brick your system

i factored in the time to briefly explain what im doing with the command when citing this example (which is why i said show and how, cause id be explaining what it does), i assume it could be easier/faster for the user if i didnt but thats irresponsible on my end

Thanks for multiplying my desire to learn terraform

Yep. I built a terraform framework that could spit out 200 nodes in minutes. It was so awesome

same here with bicep and azure

it's a bot responding without understanding the context

I'm not old enough to accept terminal commands.

And you also have Tab Completion, so most of the time you don't even have to type out the full command. Just type the first couple letters, hit tab, and there it is..

Forever is a mighty long time.

and powershell

👆💯 Every time a "manager" selected a street dweeb to run our industrial software.

you can fuck yourself by blindly following gui instructions too

i liken using the command line to going to a restaurant and telling the server what you'd like to eat, in their own language, and using the GUI as pointing at the food on the menu.

So true, eevee! I've done lots of those Win-XX support sessions. Almost always I had to ask "What did you click? Left or right mouse button?" Followed by thinking "Oh shit. How do we back out of this situation without going deeper into lala-land so need another hour?!"

similar needs are met in different ways by different people & groups

And with time, they too will learn to love the terminal, and commands. It really is so much better once you get used to it. Want to install something? Hot key the terminal open, sudo apt install <program name> ENTER. *Prompt pops up about confirming install* Hit "Y" and you're done.

incredible. all of this is wrong

There are two actual reasons to learn the arcane incantations. The first is that being able to do a bunch of automated text processing is great. For example, suppose you download an album from YouTube where it’s one giant video with timestamps in the description. You can use a few com[...]

GUIs always offer a subset of what can be done with and to what they effect. ALWAYS.

Windows is now ransomewar, wholey forcibly putting people in onedrive whether they like it of not, deleting all local files, hiding every remaining system file. It's ridiculous and would be illegal except congress is busy placating Trump. There was a time the gvt would have shut it down.

I broke all my Windows when I heard the news.. oops

Or incompetant

you can probably find better things to do with your time than deliberately being mad

It’s just like, these people think about Linux more than the average Linux user!

Also, the vocabulary around GUIs is vague and weak. "Go to", "Navigate to", blah blah. "Select" can mean click a link, click a radio button, pull down a list. Which is it? That same vagueness permeates GUI descriptions. Also GUIs change all the time, because managers.

Then linux nerds can't complain the users they help don't actually learn anything in the process, and need more of the same help later.

Command lines make the most efficient use of available hardware. That's something new Linux users need to understand. And the code tends to be very efficient too. People don't understand just how powerful their computers really are because bloatware slows them down.

it doesnt for a lot of programs

You wont understand it because you came to ask, it'll look like an eldritch invocation, it wont respect - and -- rules between the other programs... but, by your god, it will be 1e6 faster than any GUI ever... and then you'll marvel as ffmpeg turns every video file into the cleanest mp4 ever.

In Linux the GUI is used to fill in the arguments and switches that eventually go into the command line you could have used without the GUI.

Efficiency is an art form, turning complex journeys through endless menus into a swift stroke of genius 💻⚡ Sometimes a simple paste is all it takes to bridge two totally different worlds of technology 🌐✨

Brb learning every language, just in case! 😅

the goooey exist. lets goooooo!

... That said, THANK FREAKIN' GAWD for the handy "copy" button on the corner of CLI how-to's. I treasure the understanding and precision when I just want the damned thing to work.

Ah, I see. Autism. Sometimes I take shit further than intended. My apologies.

It's not Linux fault, though. It's keyboards fault. The day, you can lean back in the chair and use Ubuntu Server with one lazy arm and 2 Fingers, everyone will be on Linux.

Plus my terminal has cute little pac-man status indicators.

As someone who lives in both worlds, and writes software for both worlds, "paste this in" is all well and good, but at least with a GUI you can kind of feel your way to the answer without hoping to find someone else who just knows what to paste in.

Did the same thing when supporting windows users, since everyone could have things arranged differently.

Imaging telling some old wanker. Sudo apt me.tv -goldengirls /caption:eng login:"bejesus hoopla" password:"my1dog2named3joe@+" -darkmode:6 soundlevel/22

also the one time I tried linux it refused to see that I in fact did already have files on my hard drive

People who have non-computer things to do on the computer (like drawing comics, in my case) are stuck with windows for now, I'm afraid. 😔

Unfortunately, Clip Studio is one of the things that famously doesn't work right in Linux, so there's a whole swath of us artists who literally can't use it. 😅

You're full of shit. I know Linux. I've got 3 machines within arms reach running Linux. and you're full of shit.

Yes there is. But that is just whataboutism. We arent actively teaching people to install the remote desktop apps so malicious actors then have an easier time convincing people to do it. Teaching them to paste random terminal commands opens up a new vector.

My favorite part about wafrn having bsky integration is that I get to see posts like this, then scroll down to find some meow.social user has posted a thousands-of-chars-long dissertation on furry subcultures with HTML formatting.

"Listen, do you want step by step instructions through a maze or do you want the problem fixed?"

if you don't have a hardware-accelerated terminal then what are you even doing honestly

I’m by no means a terminal expert, but I was a computer user for 7 years before my first “real” GUI. So when something isn’t working, my gut instinct is to type in commands to the terminal.

Sorry friend you run up against the learning curve. Some folks are interested and some folks aren't...

Unix Linux software engineer and admin for over 30 years. A cleaner efficient os design. Compared to windows night and day. Desktops can be configured for that windows gui feel. Many options to chose that are solid performers also with years of development behind them.

Unfortunately, this is why I cannot get the goddamned Haskell compiler installed....

In some cases it's probably literally a million times faster. Let's say 1 second vs 11 days. As there isn't any limit of what you can past into the command line at once -- at least none that I'm aware of -- it's possible.

Shoot me. I *HATE* having to try to tell people where to click on a GUI. All video meetings should have the ability to annotate, so I can DRAW WHERE TO FRIGGING CLICK!!

Begging linux nerds to understand that the terminal is scary, and your assumption that "it'll be fine, what could go wrong with copy pasting to the terminal" is going to lead to bricked pcs.

Anything that forces you to learn terminal usage in a semi controlled environment is priceless.

Yep. That's the whole 'nixy' model. Not one huge tool that tries to do everything (aka Windows). A whole swarm of small, fast, useful tools that work together, and if the tool you need doesn't exist, you can build it yourself. In Linux, the GUI isn't the operating system, it's another tool.

In that case, it can help to ask what the command means, or how you would approach the problem in the future. They probably assumed you just wanted the solution as a one-off, rather than wanting to know WHY it works. Especially cuz, if you did, a long-winded explanation would've sucked.

Also the bash terminal is standardised while there are dozens of different graphical frontends.

Claude+powershell. It's dirty but it worky

Person: how do I do it with the GUI? Me: which one? Person: man this sucks

Not Outlook, the email might be there, it might not, it might be on mobile but not on desktop, Outlook is dreadful and unreliable trash.

This is why I always try to understand code before I paste it. If I don't understand what I'm looking at, I Google each command or try to find it written in words I understand. That way I know where to place and can troubleshoot easier.

It really is a problem with Linux UI. 100s of different options make it confusing and overwhelming, especially for new people to the platform. Makes searching for answers to problems harder, too. And then you have different package managers. At least those are largely hidden by the UIs, though.

the guis are also much less standardized. chmod works the same on every distro but guis could be different depending on distro or desktop environment or just where you got the program from

i'd say there are certainly situations where e.g. Excel is required for what someone needs to do, but so much of the time users of proprietary software will be like "Now witness the firepower of this fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL battle station!" and it's brightening the image or something.

The terminal is not as scary as it seems people

Disk Management: this partition looks to me like a first class citizen and you, user, are second class. how dare you try to delete it. that partition has more rights than you. *spits on you* DiskPart: bullet

"shell"