Linux

Unless we're in a simulation, very yes.

Normal people don't seem to realize this but the reason developers swarmed to Mac OS X over Windows when given a choice for work laptops is that Mac OS X has a built-in POSIX shell.

CLI is and will always be more expressive than a GUI. Some "web apps" have even tacitly acknowledged this by adding terminal emulators to their web apps.

The terminal makes many functions easier and faster, it's more consistent across updates and changes, can be automated with scripts and is much easier for developers to implement into software than a GUI

There's a learning curve, but there are real practical reasons for someone to use it over GUI

GUI change but the command line lasts forever. The GUI will change from version to version for any program but if you have a script or CLI that will last.

Even outside of scripting and so forth, which I use a lot, often it's far easier and faster to just cook up a wildcard string or a regex or whatever when you're faced with a folder with eleventy bazillion files in it, only some of which you'd like to move somewhere else.

Yes, you could point-and-click on all of those for the next hour and a half plucking them all out of your file browser window. Me personally, I'd really rather not.

Other similar use cases abound.

A command line is WAY faster than using the mouse, provided you can type fast enough. A thing I'd like to add is that, to me, all those shiny pointy-clicky interfaces are little more than a distraction: they literally slow me down and prevent me from doing real work. Of course, this last bit is a very personal opinion and YMMV.

IT guy here. The CLI is not something I'd expect the average computer user to use at all. However, for power users and professionals it's a force multiplier at least, and a prerequisite often.

There are several reasons for this. Firstly, IT system and server administration, in the cloud or your own hardware, is often done via the CLI. This is because it's not that common or convenient to hook up every server in a rack to a monitor to click on stuff. But dialling into it remotely via SSH or even a serial port to perform bootstrapping procedures, troubleshooting and even routine management tasks sometimes, is very quick , easy and reliable.

The other main reason is automation. If I buy 10 servers to power my website, they all need installing and configuring a whole bunch of software, e.g. an Apache web server, DNS, SQL, Active Directory, AV, firewall, networking, and a host of other services. Now imagine doing all of that by hand. You don't even need to be a professional sysadmin installing server racks for a living for this to be important. Even if you run a couple desktop/servers/Raspberry Pi/NAS at home, they'll need updating, upgrading or replacing every once in a while. Having to click your way through everything every time you need to (re)configure them gets old very quickly.

GUIs are extremely poor at providing a consistent, predictable, automatable way to do things. They force you to do mostly everything manually and be present to supervise the whole thing. With the CLI you can script out pretty much any task and let it run in the background while you go do other things. I really don't see CLIs going anywhere anytime soon. I'd say it's actually the opposite. PowerShell was Microsoft's way of acknowledging this very fact years ago. The primitive Windows Batch scripting language wasn't cutting it for anyone, especially Windows Server users who had to painstakingly configure every Win Server install they did manually through a GUI wizard.

Used the terminal yesterday to search my ~~piracy~~ drive full of movies and shit in a directory structure, find any duplicate files by size/md5, and then it piped the results into my terminal editor of choice where I commented out the lines corresponding to files to delete, then it deleted them for me. Saved a couple hundred gb, and idk how to do it through a gui (besides the insurmountable task of clicking through all those folders.)

Not only that, but turned out I had a bunch of dups in my image folder too that I wasn't prepared to deal with right then, so in vim I just :/folder and n n n n repeatedly to get to the next relevant entries, made it even faster.

Took maybe 5min (not counting wait time, I ran it, made dinner, and came back and it was ready for me.)

Now, I'm going to peek at that forgotten picture folder in the GUI because I have NO idea what's going on there and it'll be helpful for me to get eyes on it instead of reading filenames, so I do use that too, for me it isn't all or nothing, it's both, some things are just better CLI and some are actually better GUI, and some can be either depending on how I feel today.

Using the terminal doesn't make normal people feel superior, it is simply more efficient to type commands than click UIs.

Absolutely!

First, terminal is, for the most part, distro- and DE-agnostic. Unless you use something specific to the distro or DE (like package management or working with DE dependencies), what would work on one Linux system would also work on the other. This allows you to immediately get a grasp of any Linux system.

Second, terminal is fast. You can search through GUI for all eternity, or you can type one line that does what you want, saving tons of time in the process.

With that said, both GUI and terminal should develop hand in hand to provide a user experience that suits both regular and power users alike. Windows commonly shifts to the side of regular user, while making it harder for power users to do what they want. Linux as it was in the old days shifted towards power users.

Nowadays, I think Linux finally strikes the right balance - it is accessible and powerful at the same time.

For programming it's essential.

It's easier to automate.

It really depends on what you mean by "the real world".

The most common use for Linux is on servers. For this scenario, not only does the terminal make sense, but it's often required as there is no GUI installed.

For Linux on the desktop, the terminal is very much analogous to Windows PowerShell. More casual users can ignore it for most purposes, but may sometimes need it for troubleshooting.

If you are trying to say that you "know" Linux, say for career development, you absolutely need to know the terminal. Nearly all professional roles will require it.

In Linux, GUIs are almost always a front end with limited options for a CLI. Also, with CLI you can chain commands to get even more control.

Sometimes it's easier to type cd ~/D{tab}/M{tab}{enter} open . than using the GUI.

Plus all the fancy stuff that people do with scripting

I know people who work in windows environments as developers or admins using power shell a lot. They can automate sooo many things through scripting. I work in IT too but this advanced scripting shit is still witchcraft to me. But this is real world usage which makes digital infrastructure management work a lot more efficient. Especially if you have repetitive tasks say on different machines. With GUI you would just be clicking through the same shit over and over again (while slowly loosing your mind).

My work and personal computers typically have two applications open—a web browser and a terminal (well, really a shitload of terminals). I don't have a desktop, I have a terminal. I don't have a graphical file manager, I have a terminal. I'm not doing this because it's cool, I do it because it's efficient as all fuck and makes it trivial to fire off one-liners to automate shit.

Like, I stream a certain video game competitively, and I need to keep recordings if I want to submit runs. I started off recording my gameplay using x264, and the file sizes were too damn big. I tested various av1 options out using ffmpeg on a small sample clip, and when I was done it was simplicity itself to just do this:

# I'm typing this on my phone so I'm not going to write out the ffmpeg args
for file in recordings/*.mp4; do ffmpeg "${some_args[@]}"; done

I didn't have to learn some stupid GUI batch processing thing. I didn't have to install any extra tools (since I already had ffmpeg). I just took my command, substituted the input and output files for variable names, and looped that shit.

I feel that the command line is the most efficient interface for a huge number of tasks. Discoverability is awful (although improved with good tab completion and just reading the fucking manual), but the efficiency and composability of a CLI built in the Unix tradition is hard to overstate imo.

yes, it’s the most natural and efficient way to do lots of things, and the only way to do some things.

Of course, some of the best single-purpose applications are command-line tools.

FFMPEG or YT-DLP for examples.

You've got plenty of examples of how the command line is more than jus a "cool" way to do things. So I'll address a couple other issues.

On windows you are discouraged to use command line because that way windows gets more control over what you can do or can't do. Remember windows is not a neutral piece of software, it's a company's business model. On Linux there's no reason to impede using the command line, all the power to you.

(because let's be honest, it makes us feel superior) I don't know if it's because of my autism, but this strike me as odd. Do people really think like this? I have a certain expertise, that's computers, and I can use a bunch of different tools to the best of my knowledge to do things. I choose command line or GUI depending on how easy the task is to do in each or the time it takes. Not everyone is trying to show off, it's just the best tool to use sometimes.

Pipes etc.

A GUI can't combine commands from several different programs and move data to and from and use that with the ease and explicit nature of a terminal.

Depends on your work. If you manage headless remote servers or computers, terminal through SSH is kinda the only way to use the computer. There is a lot of software and algorithms or databases that don't actually require a gui. Terminal comands are also great because they can be easily reused and further integrated and automated.

Many things are way easier on the command line than they could ever be in a GUI. Especially for processes that need repeatability, e.g converting a whole directory of images in a certain way.

Here's a task for you: how do you convert a folder with 5000 images from png to jpg, while ensuring that they are scaled to at most 1024x768 and have a semi transparent watermark on them?

I know how to do it quickly using the command line, but have no idea how to do it with a GUI.

Cmd was torturous and powershell not much better.

Some things are just massively tedious to do through any gui. Sometimes the converse is true.

One reason why LLM is desired as a ui element is that you can describe what you want in text without having to remember how to navigate a bunch of convoluted ui elements. CLI is related, except more precise but more demanding on specifics of input.

I already know what I want the computer to do: why do I have to search with my slow-ass eyes through what someone else decided was the optimum workflow to get the job done?

Aside from what the others said, I think a big advantage for CLIs is also that they're a lot quicker to develop and extend with functionality. So, while yes, there are GUI options for lots of tasks, if you need to do niche things, there is still a higher chance for there to be a CLI for that, or for a more general CLI to be feature-rich enough that it covers your niche use-case.

Terminal is nice for a lot of repetitive tasks that would be a chore via GUI.

Even though I've been a Linux user for almost 20 years >!(fuck I feel old)!<, I mostly use GUI stuff. Terminal is super neat for doing batch stuff, I've even learned how to do some stuff for windows for whenever I inevitably get a call from family to fix their shit. I was pleasantly surprised with winget and I keep a .txt file to batch install common general use apps for them, same as I keep some dotfiles for getting my preferences over on a new PC or install.

Absolutely, I use PowerShell loads every single day.

Some things are easier or faster with a GUI and some things are easier or faster with a terminal.

I try to use terminal versions of programs whenever possible. It's a lot more pleasant to work on a system remotely in the terminal than using graphical programs, and generally automation is better. If you're accustomed to a workflow centered around the terminal, you can take advantage of those benefits.

I've worked on systems over X11, VNC, RDP, etc, but you're just generally going to have a better time using a remote Linux system, especially with any appreciable latency or limited bandwidth, over mosh or ssh.

I also get a lot of mileage out of the fact that I use terminal-only emacs for a lot of things, and it has packages to cover a lot of areas. Long learning curve there, though.

That being said, there are some categories of software where there aren't really competitive terminal alternatives. For most image-editing or Web browsing, I'd use a GUI program.

Most users also won't run into this, but for sysadmins in particular, having access to a system via a serial console even when nothing else is functional is not uncommon. If you don't know how to use a system via the terminal, you're going to have a harder time of it.

While it doesn't have to split along terminal/GUI likes, a lot of terminal software uses text files for configuration intended to be edited as such, and Unix has a long history of powerful tools to manipulate text. Store configuration in a git repository, migrate it to a new system, view and merge configuration changes, search through config, etc.

Also, the GUI has a tendency to be reinvented by people every few years as they hop on some new paradigm or similar. Maybe they decide that they want a unified UI for touchscreen and mouse

one such example that happened

or something like that. That can being benefits, but it also throws out a user's experience with an existing UI, which is really obnoxious. Linux is better about letting users continue to use their favored GUI interface than, say, Windows is ("Microsoft says you use Windows 11 UI, end of story"), but there's still some pressure. The terminal is a pretty mature environment. Yeah, okay, it's changed to some degree over time, but most of the experience I accrue continues to be pretty directly usable as time goes on. I think that the last significant change I made was switching from GNU screen to the pretty-similar tmux. I generally want UIs to be left alone by software developers unless they have a really good reason to change things.

Related to the above, I've also seen a lot of GUI widget toolkits come and go over the decades. From a maintenance standpoint, 30 year old terminal software generally is pretty much good to go, whereas some GUI toolkits are dead and the GTK and Qt people are constantly changing things and doing new major releases that substantially change things. As a developer, I don't really want to keep having maintenance inflicted on me by the UI guys.

So, in short, from a user standpoint:

• Better remote operation.

• Better automation.

• Ability to use systems in a fairly-broken or limited state.

• Fewer disruptive changes to UI over time.

I fixed a family member's Windows PC once. Stuck in an update boot loop. Had to rebuild the bootloader to fix it. It took ten minutes once I looked up the commands online. He had already taken it to a PC repair shop and they said all they could do was reinstall the operating system. Honestly, these Windows people are like handicapped because they never really interact with their computers. They only interact with a kind of software nanny that keeps them away from the scary stuff for their own good.

I love my terminal.

Aside from the automation, which has been mentioned already, I tend to seek out terminal based solutions and heavily use it over GUIs because:

• my wrists tend to hurt after using a mouse for too long (mouse use is now limited mostly to browsing the web and spreadsheets)
• lower resource footprint means I can do more with less hardware