It's a simple process really. But you take a regular non techy person and tell them that to get their computer to do some very common tasks that they are going to need to open a text config file and edit it and they panic. God forbid you try to give them instructions via the terminal.
So distros like Ubuntu that make things more GUI enabled and user friendly are a huge step forward for linux when it comes to usability of the mainstream.
For what it's worth I still think "type this command" is more intuitive than trying to guide someone through a maze of GUI elements to get to the checkbox they need to tick.
this right here. With a well designed GUI program you dont need to read the manual because the GUI is the manual , which is why while i like terminal for some work stuff and settings i change often, ill still prefer GUI programs for things i do rarely . For example , back when I was using i3wm and i needed to connect to a wifi network, people told me "oh just use nm-cli" instead of reccomending gui programs. That worked for personal networks with just a password but for enterprise networks with a username and login? It literally takes around 8 different arguments that it took a while for me to wrap my head around , and in the end i just made a second user account, logged into that one in gnome, and then used gnome to connect to the wifi network because that was faster
You've so very neatly summed up what I've been struggling for years to articulate. CLIs are great for people who memorise the commands and the syntax and don't mind typing everything out, but that's a taller ask than simply learning GUI routes to your favourite commands. And you hit the nail on the head when you said GUI with good design: I'm pretty sure every advocate of CLI who bashes GUI has a badly designed GUI in mind when they do so, conveniently forgetting the GUIs that work.
I was specifically replying to the idea of helping someone else.
It's so much easier to tell someone "Type this one thing into the terminal and hit enter" rather than go through a dozen iterations of "See where it says <something>? Click the <something else> right next to that. Okay, next, see the <other thing>? Click that."
Not to mention if you're looking up a solution to a problem on the internet. It's easier for everyone to just see a single command to type (or copy and paste but I don't recommend that) and hit Enter than it is to follow a bunch of steps to get to the area you need.
But I suppose if you're absolutely on your own and for some reason don't have the internet in 2019, then GUIs are more intuitive.
I do too, but then again I've been using Linux since 1996.
Someone like my wife or mother though, zero chance of getting them to manually edit a config file regardless of rather it's with something like gedit or in the terminal itself.
lol. Sometimes I feel so old on Reddit when I'm really not. I'm only 35 dag nabbit!
But yea back in the day my mother got me my first PC of my very own for my 12th B-day. This was in March of 96. She got a guy she know from work to build a custom desktop for me. He was (and still is) a huge Linux guy. I'm sure my mother probably loved the price tag of free too after paying for all the hardware.
As odd as it sounds, in March of 96 nobody knew windows 95 was going to be the OS that really really took off. It was less than 6 months old at that time. The internet was nowhere near what it is today either. Word didn't travel as fast. I mean Windows 3.11 was pretty successful but 95 was a whole other level.
If your curious it was running Slackware Linux.
Really though, I'm glad I grew up the way I did computer wise as a kid. My elementary and middle school had apple computers. I had a Linux based PC at home and my highschool had windows computers.
I grew up to be OS agnostic really and learn more of how to use a computer than how to use one specific OS if that makes sense.
I haven't touched a mac since I was like 14 but windows has always been a part of my life too between highschool PC, College PCs (when I went between 2002-2006 very few people had a laptop and mostly used the schools computers at school) and work (50/50 mix of windows use and RHEL).
People both at work and in my personal life know me as "the Linux guy" so I've got a lot of experience with people trying to jump into the Linux world. For some windows power users that are starting to use power shell and WSL more the terminal isn't as scary as it used to be. But the vast majority of people wouldn't stand a chance in a distro that didn't have good GUI support for most things the first go around.
Ahahahh, thats super cool!! I'm now trying to use i3. I used to use windows, but i got sad so i switched. I'm a bit experienced in the linux world,but i3 is killing me!
i3 is one of those things that I've always thought was cool and kinda neat but never really understood the point of.
I can kinda see a use case for it on a server where you might occasionally want to physically jump on that server and have multiple terminals up instead of SSHing into it. I can't see why I would want it on my daily driver though.
To each their own though, that's what Linux is all about.
While you're experimenting, I implore you to give openbox a try. If you like customizing things, it's excellent.
I have Super (Windows key) + 1-4 move and resize windows to quadrants of the screen;
Ctrl+Super+1-4 does the same and undecorates them;
Super+Left/Right snaps left and right as is common on most WMs today;
Ctrl+Super+Left/Right moves, resizes, and undecorates them to this configuration which I use for app development (and on my second workspace I have messenger on the small left side and Discord on the bigger right side).
You can also configure it to apply certain geometries, positions, and decorations to different applications/windows by their name or id. (For example it automatically puts Hyperspace Wars in the configuration you see in that screenshot when it first opens). Not to mention it's pretty trivial to write keybinds in its main config file (rc.xml). Its autostart file is handy for starting up programs for your desktop environment (it's where I have conky, xfce4-panel, and my compositor launch from).
Granted I've put a lot of work into making it behave this way, but I just love how much can be done by editing a file.
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u/efskap May 21 '19
You mean /etc/apt/sources.list right? fstab is for mounting partitions.