Possibly linuxCan You Use Linux Without the Terminal? (How to Geek article)
HappyRedditRefugeeThis whole threat is a HUGE circle jerk and a collection of all the “I USE ARCH BTW” variations imaginable.
“WHY WOULDN’T ALL PEOPLE WANT THE KNOWLEDGE TO CRAFT COMMANDS TO MANIPULATE, FILTER AND SEARCH TEXT IN A WHOLE FILE SYSTEM WITH JUST ONE COMMAND? UNCULTURED PESANTS”
Come, not everyone is a computer nerd, nor everyone ones to optimize 30s in the workflow if it means memorizing a bunch of commands, their syntax and options.
If you want to use Linux without the terminal nowadays it’s pretty easy. But also I think the fear of the terminal is part of the culture that consumer electronics have cultivated where people don’t know (or want to know) how their systems work.
If you take the time to use it, not only can you save yourself time, but also learn a lot more about how you can fix things when they go wrong! That kind of knowledge gives you so much more ownership of your system, because you don’t have to rely on your manufacturer to solve problems for you.
Same for Mac and Windows too, the terminal is something that shouldn’t be necessary, but when it is it helps to know what you’re doing. :)
I think not everyone needs to know how their device works. Specialization is what advances us as humans after all. If they wanted to know, good for them, and if they don’t also good for them. If I were using a car, I don’t need to know how the engine convert a chemical energy, transfer power, and generate thrust
Contrast that with CLI where if you forgot or don’t know any command there is little help or indicator of what’s available and what can be done without external help.
man would like to have words with your strawman.
And how does the user suppose to know to type
man? He may remember the instructions to check man, but he may not. For us, those 3 letter words are very familiar, but others need time to remember them. On GUI, this is no problem because as I stated they will bound to find it by exploring. Basically point and click adventure games I guess rather than the guessing game. And users will choose the path they most familiar first.
Tlaloc_TemporalBigger problem, even if they know about MAN pages, remembering what their looking for is hard. You can’t type ‘man dnf’ if you don’t remember what your package manager is called.
I wonder how feasible searching MAN pages is.
Yeah good point. Navigation can be unintuitive too. Like, how do you quit? Is it q? Ctrl+C? What even is the weird symbol before C? Those are some of the hurdles that must be overcome when coming to CLI and not necessarily easy to remember. Sure you can do it in 1 hour, but say tomorrow would you remember it again? What if the system is running smoothly for 1 month and you never opened the terminal again after those 1 hour?
You don’t need man, just type the command with no arguments and you’ll get the help message.
Alright, try it with
cat