For a one off issue it's easier to send a cli command they can copy paste than to detail steps in the gui.
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2026
877 points (97.0% liked)
linuxmemes
28914 readers
1180 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack users for any reason. This includes using blanket terms, like "every user of thing".
- Don't get baited into back-and-forth insults. We are not animals.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudoin Windows. - No porn, no politics, no trolling or ragebaiting.
- Don't come looking for advice, this is not the right community.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, <loves/tolerates/hates> systemd, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
5. π¬π§ Language/ΡΠ·ΡΠΊ/Sprache
- This is primarily an English-speaking community. π¬π§π¦πΊπΊπΈ
- Comments written in other languages are allowed.
- The substance of a post should be comprehensible for people who only speak English.
- Titles and post bodies written in other languages will be allowed, but only as long as the above rule is observed.
6. (NEW!) Regarding public figures
We all have our opinions, and certain public figures can be divisive. Keep in mind that this is a community for memes and light-hearted fun, not for airing grievances or leveling accusations. - Keep discussions polite and free of disparagement.
- We are never in possession of all of the facts. Defamatory comments will not be tolerated.
- Discussions that get too heated will be locked and offending comments removed. Β
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It's pretty easy to explain why people prefer CLI over GUI programs. You have to learn a new interface for every single GUI program, whereas you learn one interface for every CLI program.
CLI requires remembering commands though, or developing patience with your up arrow key.
And if you want help, is it β/hβ or β/?β or β-hβ or ββhelpβ or ββhβ or just βhelpβ
I canβt remember that I need to pee, let alone what commands do what, save for my up arrow.
Donβt get me wrong, Iβm in the terminal constantly, but Iβll pick a GUI over CLI every time if itβs an option.
It's always fun when there's a GUI tool for something (in my case, trying to set up wireguard with gnome) that just doesn't work, and all the posts online about it just say "yeah that's literally never worked, here's the cli command"
Or colour profiles for your monitor in Wayland, you can change them in the gui but nothing will ever apply.
I find myself having trust issues with Linux GUI tools as actually functioning seems to be optional. But the switches sure look pretty...
It is much easier to convey CLI instructions over the internet.
The only thing enthusiasts love more than obscure CLI commands is random github links. The next time someone sends me a github link without explicit instructions on how to turn the contents of that link into a program on my computer, I'm hiring some witches from Etsy to hex them
Come on It's not the enthusiasts fault! When you get used to the terminal and running commands in it, its vastly faster than through a gui.
"terminal is love, terminal is life"
GUI tools can be great, I live using then but I hate writing documentation for them.
Documenting CLI is much easier to do and maintain than documenting GUI. A few lines of text that I can adjust if needed vs a pile of screenshots.
Shout out to Vorta Backup, Borg Warehouse, and TrueNAS for allowing me to back my PC up without typing a single line of CLI.
The problem I have is that the GUI tools are very specific to distros, dms, and releases. It's a problem that arises from having so many choices.
CLI tools work long after they're deprecated and very often cross distros.
Something as simple as getting your IP address can be in diferent areas, the settings->network panel isn't even a safe bet. A lot of distros are now putting a network or wifi icon in your tray, but it doesn't always look the same, can be hidden, isn't in the same place.
Ifconfig and ip work on everything and can be installed on almost, if not every, platform.
If you do a web search for how to find your local network address in linux using the GUI, you're given a choice of a bunch of different places to look and the reccomendations don't line up word-for-word with what the current menus in KDE->settings look like. What's more interesting is when I go into kde-settings and do manages to find Wi-Fi and internet instead of network connections, it doesn't give me my ip, it's all just blank.
And a lot of desktop distros know how to suggest installation so if I type ip addr it might say do you want to "apt install iproute2"? or dnf or whatever I need to make it work regardless of distro.
But if I'm trying to use a GUI it's harder to figure out how to make a GUI tool appear. What's it's package name on this distro? Should I be using Flatpak and if so where's that? Etc. And this lack of assistance isn't (just) bad design because I don't know how you'd design a GUI where I can go "I want the NetworkInspector tool" and it just does the right thing.
"I'm having an issue with Windows"
"Please open CMD.EXE and run sfc /scannow and DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth
If that doesn't solve your issue, you need to reinstall Windows
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.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
I find itβs 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.
a UI should offer everything a user can do in a given moment, readily available, nothing hidden behind more than a single menu.
That would be a nightmare for any sufficiently complex software. Can you imagine how dense the UI would need to be for something like Blender or even Excel if literally every possible option of "things available to do right now" had to be at most two clicks away?
Bud theres obviously exceptions for massive suites like that. But I'm talking about apps with built in UIs that the dev clearly threw together as a last minute thought. Apps with every single thing you could possibly have to do wither burried deep in 10k submenus, or hastily packed onto a window.
All I'm saying is there should be a clear and obvious workflow. Devs shouldn't be afraid to say "I know better than you, do it this way". Throwing every single tool on a toolbar like with Office suites or editing suites is awful IMO. Gimme menus, but gimme menus that make sense (looking at you Microsoft)
Anyway, you can disagree with me, and it won't ever effect you, that's the beautiful thing about the open software world. My opinions can be total shit, and you get to just ignore them π₯°
I don't really disagree, at least in principle. You're absolutely correct that workflows should be clear and developers often do not make good UI/UX. You just didn't really qualify your original statement with any of that and made it an absolute, but you've clarified now and I'm pretty sure we agree.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
You can't copy and paste into a GUI, and it's painful to help people to use them.
Or pipe GUI output into another GUI function.
Or >> log.txt
So you want newbies blindly entering scripts to there command line and not knowing what that are doing.
They're blindly doing it either way. I understand and want GUIs as well, but dumping commands into terminal is starting to seem easier than "go here click this, now click that"
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(7 replies)
basic_task_list = ['copy and paste', 'install package', 'type', 'keyboard', 'read and write' ]
for basic_task in basic_task_list:
print(f"""
Newbies can't {basic_task}.
They never {basic_task} in windows.
Windows has replaced {basic_task} with copilot, this is what linux needs to do to compete.
How will linux ever hope to attract windows user if it still maintains this ancient hacker 1337xor tools like {basic_task}?
Users just want to turn on computer and watch it do computance - how does linux not get this?
""")
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Tbh I use CLI tools on my M4 Mac too because it saves time and it's more efficient.
I've been in a situation like this recently and all I can say is that the CLI is universal.
Yes, it is complex. Yes, it is challenging. But it gets things done.
Don't be afraid.
I know what you mean, just beware: in lots of cases it's not as universal (as in distro-independent) as some still think it is.
For people who want to get things done with their PC that isn't inherently IT-related (like, doing office work or music production or anything else) and just need to do the occasional light sysadmin thing like setting up new drives to be auto-mounted somewhere, pointing to GUI tools is just so much better. And in many cases it is also safer (making your system fail on boot with a small typo in the fstab is painfully easy).
load more comments
(5 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
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
otherwise you end up with windows
Windows without the garbage? I'm okay with that.
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 something or something --help in most cases
load more comments
(6 replies)
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Tbf cli help is copy paste, GUI help is something I didn't want to help with even when I was being paid for it
βJoin our Discord server!β
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.
It's unlikely I will use your "accessible" GUI tools, but I applaud you for making them, even if they're shit. It's like art, the more art there is, the better the world is, even if I personally can't appreciate some of it, I acknowledge the greatness if it's existence.
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.
load more comments
(1 replies)
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.
load more comments
(8 replies)
Simple things can work well in GUI.
Now, working on a GUI that tries to expose every little features? No thank you. I would not want to develop it, and I would not want to have to use it.
It's ok to go install a software through discover instead of using the CLI.
view more: next βΊ