Based on my experience, I think you can. Many distros nowadays offer ways to do things without the use of the terminal. In Linux Mint, for example, you can rely solely on the Update Manager to update all installed applications and modules rather than using the terminal. You can also uninstall apps by right-clicking on them in the Menu and selecting the uninstall option. And finally, if you want to move files around, even to some locations that require root, you can do that using the File Explorer app (e.g. Nemo).
That being said, when I started on my Linux journey, I made it a point to actually learn some terminal commands, because I saw it as an important feature in Linux and a good skill to possess.
I can’t personally, but I’ve installed/set up Linux systems for quite a lot of older people, and I think only one of them ever uses the terminal for anything. The rest just… use the computer.
On the whole, they’re pretty much just using Libreoffice, Firefox and a few other bits these days. If something needs the terminal to fix, we’re already past the point where they’ve phoned me to pop round and fix it.
These used to be Ubuntu systems, but I switched them all to Mint after having endless Snap permission problems with printers, USB sticks and other peripherals. Once up and running, it’s pretty low maintenance.
I guess they don’t need to use the terminal, because I’ll go and do it if it’s necessary - but we are looking at once every few years. Not a lot of tech support needed.
On my own machine, I probably use the terminal every day.
Interestingly enough, Xfce4 has a kiosk mode. You could build a custom desktop for them and restrict changes. You then could do mass updates with Ansible or Saltstack
It’s a good plan for a more professional setup, but in this distinctly unprofessional setup, if I did it remotely, I wouldn’t get my chat and a cup of tea and biscuit :)
The author argues that you don’t need to use the terminal but constantly argues that you should. The average computer user doesn’t even know which version of Windows they’re using. Many don’t even know if they’re using Windows or Mac. Until Linux gets over the obsession with the terminal we’re never going to have the year of Linux.
If you want a non-terminal os based on linux you just have to make something like android or chromeos or steamdeckos.
Those are and pretty popular, so I don’t know who can claim linux is “terminal obsessed” it’s just a kernel and there is a wide diversity of os based on it.
Debian , fedora , suse etc might all be “obsessed” with the terminal.
For me that’s just the obvious economical way to offer features. decent GUI costs a lot more to develop and document - so you have to have less features for a given amount of dev time. Or you have google /valve/microsoft type amounts of resources to spend.
I always thought this “year of linux” thing was a meme to make fun of canonical or idiotic tech journalists .
Is anyone realitsitcally interested in volunteering their time to win over legions of Microsoft fanboys. Fuck me sounds like hell.
And frankly the use of terminal is going to be far from the first blocker to linux adoption for those who don’t even know they’re using windows or mac.
The problem with the cli is you need to memorize a whole bunch of new words and syntax in order to do anything. You also need to memorize what not to do so you don’t accidentally erase your system while using rm or cp or whatever.
Even something as simple as copying and pasting, which works the same in every single other program has new rules in the terminal. I mean, think about that. If you’re just learning bash, then the first thing you’ll be doing is copy pasting commands. But even that has the hurdle of 'oh, I guess this is the one program where ctrl-c means something else
Like, how do you look at sudo, cat, man, and apt, and think ‘yeah that’s intuitive’. And forget about multitasking, new users won’t even know how to quit most programs (is it ctrl-q? Just q? Esc? Ctrl-c? Ctrl-d? Wait how do I undo that, is it ctrl-z? Wait where did the thing go
You know not everyone likes to read a wall of text. Some people prefer watching a video than reading an article. So some people just like to use GUI than CLI, and that’s fine.
I disagree. Many people like to have control over there computer even if they don’t want to learn a bunch of new skills.
Linux isn’t for everyone but its gotten to the point where someone could figure it out if they so choose. It no longer is the unstable mess it was 10-20 years ago.
The article is really trying to sell us, the reader, that using Linux without knowing how to use the command line is not only possible but totally feasible. Unfortunately, after each paragraph that expresses that sentiment we are treated to up to several paragraphs on how it’s totally easier, faster, and more powerful to do things via thé command line, and hey did you know that more people like coding on Linux than windows? Did you know you can do more powerful things with bash, awk, and sed than you ever could in a file manager?!
FFS vim and nano are brought up and vim’s “shortcuts” are praised… in an article on how you can totally use Linux through a gui and never need to open up the command line.
Who is this written for? outside of people who not only already use Linux but are convinced that using any other OS is both a moral failing and a form of self-harm?
For clarity’s sake: I have been daily driving Linux, specifically ArchLinux, for the past 9 years, across a rotation of laptop and desktop computers. I do almost everything in the command line and prefer it that way.
I still think if you want people to try Linux you need to chill the fuck out on getting them to use the command line. At the very least, until they’re actually interested in using Linux on their own.
It is for the sake of combatting the commonly held belief that you can’t do anything without the terminal in Linux.
Progress on the accessiblility, and GUI centric applications and functionality in Linux has been huge in the last decade or two. It is now entirely possible to use a Linux system while rarely needing the terminal. And if you have someone techy helping set it up for you then it is possible to never have to.
I’ve tried to run Ubuntu, mint, Debian, and couple other distros without the terminal to see if I can actually recommend it to non-geeks. And every time, I conclude I can’t because the fucking “software center” (or whatever it’s called) is always garbage, and it’s easier to just use apt.
The only time I’ll recommend Linux to a non-tech person is when the hardware is so old that it would just be junked without Linux.
Using screenshots, demonstrate to me how the current edition of Linux Mint’s Software Manager application is “garbage” and show me how the Apple App Store, Google Play Store or the Windows Store is better.
I can agree that there are not great software managers out there, Pop!_Shop always felt like it was malfunctioning to me, and Synaptic Package Manager works but has some significant klunk, but…what’s wrong with Mint Software Manager that anyone else gets right.
Keep in mind, most people would be coming from windows where installing software is going to some website, hoping it isn’t a fake malware site, running their exe with admin privileges, and clicking next through a bunch of eulas until it finally is done. By comparison even the worst software centers are an improvement.
Not sure if Bauh is available for Debian and it’s derivatives, but it’s an amazing software center. If anything, use synaptic on Debian. It’s much better than any software center there.
Yeah, obviously, or the title wouldn’t even have happened.
And it’s been that way for a while now. Back when windows 10 happened, I was able to install mint, get most of my preferred programs set up, and handle data transfer with zero CLI use. Which was awesome, because my dyslexic ass would have taken forever otherwise. It wasn’t until I started putzing around for pop and giggles that I even opened a terminal.
My mom w as able to jump right in after installation of mint, and go through the gui to try things out, no issues.
I am a gui only user. AMA. I have to use command line occasionally but it’s less than once a month, if that. Im on EndeavourOS desktop for over 2 years with Bauh managing updates. My home server runs Unraid with a web GUI interface maybe used CLI twice in 5 years? They told me Linux could be what I wanted it to be. I don’t want to use command line, so I don’t!
I find the documentation to be very good for Arch based distros. The EOS forums or Archlinux.org wiki almost always has what I need. Otherwise the github page usually has Arch install directions that are very clear. The major things I’ve had to do in terminal is just initial set up of applications, enabling things to run on startup or changing configs. For example, and this is the most complicated example I can think of. I use grub-btrfs to put my Timeshift snapshots into the grub menu. All I really had to do was 3 commands:
sudo systemctl start grub-btrfsd
sudo systemctl enable grub-btrfsd
sudo systemctl edit --full grub-btrfsd
The first two commands start the daemon and set it to run on start up, the 3rd command is editing the config so I could use Timeshift over Snapper. Again this is the most complicated example I can think of and its 3 lines. Not only that but I was able to find documentation on two different sites. In under a minute of googling.
I’ve been daily driving Linux Mint for 10 years now. The answer to this question is “for what most people consider everyday usage, you have to use the Linux terminal about as often as you have to edit the Windows registry.” And in fact over the 10 years I’ve been a Linux user, GUI tools in Linux are increasingly available, and I’ve heard Windows normies talking about the registry more.
When I started out, Mint shipped with Synaptic Package Manager, and a lot of distros didn’t include a GUI at all. Now GUI package managers are the rule rather than the exception and most have bespoke polished app store -like things. You of course can still use apt or dnf or pacman or whatever, but you decreasingly have to.
I never once touched the registry on my Win 98, Win XP, Win Vista or Win 7 machines. Win 8 required a couple registry keys to turn off that…curtain that you had to click away to get to the login screen? and a few other “tablet first” features Win 8 had, and now I hear “just go and add these registry keys to put the start menu on the left, turn off ads, re-enable right click and retract the rectal thermometer.”
Linux is becoming more normie friendly while Windows is genuinely becoming less normie friendly.
Yes you can but you often see the terminal used when helping people online. This is because it works across desktop environments and mostly across distros, however it does give the impression that the terminal is needed.
I didn’t see anyone else mention this but, as someone who uses Linux Mint, if you are going to install software through the Software Manager, read the reviews for the app you want before downloading it. Linux Mint’s Software Manager is full of apps that are so outdated that some of them aren’t even compatible with the current version of Linux Mint. There are other issues as well, like how there are at least 20 different versions of Wine and most of them are very old versions. I’d understand if they want to keep legacy apps for the older, still supported, versions of Linux Mint but it can be confusing to use sometimes.
This 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
Edit just to give an example, an office worker may only need to use a word processor and their OS be up to date. If the user can just click the GUI to update the OS rather than typing the command for whatever package manager the OS uses, it is good enough for him. Sysadmin can give them the instruction once and done.
If the user forgot the instruction, they can explore it on their own with GUI without internet since no matter how deep a GUI config is, then there must be a way to get there (assuming the UI designer isn’t shit). 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.
I could not agree more. The number of people in here who are demanding that everyone who uses an OS understand it completely is absolutely ridiculous. I’d love to sit down and watch these people rebuild a lawnmower engine or service the compressor on their refrigerator. Hell, a shocking number of people I meet don’t know how to cook for themselves and they’re going to demand that end users be able to chroot and save a nonbootable system? Get out of here.
It’s pretty unreasonable to expect people to know all the intricacies of their OS unless it’s their job, but I do think people could stand to treat their computer less like an unknowable magic box when they need to work with it and take a few minutes to try any basic troubleshooting at all. An example of the sort of thing I’m talking about, last year, my fan stopped working nearly as well and began making crazy amounts of noise. Could I explain to you how the motor in my fan works? Absolutely not. But I unplugged it, looked up how to disassemble it and got out my screwdrivers and opened it up to see if there was anything that I could see wrong with it. Turns out there was a lot of hair wrapped around a shaft and the base of the blades that built up over the years I’ve had it, and removing that and reassembling it was all it took to get it working fine again.
Plenty of people don’t want to put in even that small amount of time and effort to understand things when it comes to computers, which is also a valid choice of its own, but they tend to annoy me when they attribute being unable to do something to the system being too complicated to understand/use, rather than owning their decision to focus their time and energy elsewhere. There are absolutely complex programs that are not accessible for non-tech people on Linux or the BSDs, but the same could be said for Windows and Mac. In the case of the other two, people just choose the option that works for them, but with Linux, they decide ahead of time that Linux is tough and complicated and don’t even try. It could be something as simple as they want to install Debian and need non-free firmware to use their wireless card, there are people who will declare this to complicated to understand and discard the idea of using an OS entirely over a question that can be resolved in less than 5 minutes with a quick search and nano, all because “Oh, I’m not a computer person, it says terminal.”
Yeah, you do make a good point about misattributing the system being incapable to their lack of research. But people don’t like it when they are wrong/corrected most of the time. It also applies everywhere, computers just so happen to be the most prominent. The point is that people will complain about anything anywhere.
You bring up an example of installing Debian and needing non-free firmware for their wireless card. Take a step back and think how many people are even aware about the term non-free? It is quite a ubiquitous english word with different meanings in the open source community. People reading it will assume they know what it means.
The scenario when someone that is fed up with windows and decides to install debian will see the word “non-free” and attribute it to “you must pay” at glance. If the resource they used to install it mentions and clarify what non-free means, good. Otherwise, it can be a boogeyman for them and make them re-think their decision to switch.
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.
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.
Bigger 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.
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?
There is a large degree of willful ignorance. Its 2024 and the degree of computer illiteracy is astounding.
I was an 80s kid but even I grew up with computers: Atari, Commodore and Amstrad. I then learnt PCs with DOS. All pretty much self learnt from 8 years old as no one else in my family knew shit about computers so I was on my own.
These days computers are so user friendly ad practically run themselves, even Linux but the amount of people who cant perform basic computer tasks even in Windows is unbelievable. Do they even still teach computers at schools anymore?
Do you know how everything in your house works? How to repair everything? No right?
Would you be brave enough to mess with the grounding of your house, or the AC or the heaters, the washing machine, the doors? Not eveyone wants mess with every (subsystem) thing in their house/live"
Most of the people I know want their PC to work and if somwthing goes wrong they just send it to repair or ask somebody else to fix it, they don’t wanna do it themselves, which I find normal, they have little to no interesting in PCs, and that is compleatly fine.
And before someone says "Yeah, but the computer won’t kill you if you fuck up the fixing or messing, let me tell you, a “sudo rm -r” or “sudo chown -R” can fuck you system BAR, making you loose important data and info.
-…But refugee -I hear you about to type-, they SHOULD have 10921 back-ups in atleast 2542 independent locations. Yo, they don’t wanna even see the terminal, and you want them to interest themselves for data integrity and redundacy? Come on.
I didn’t say you have to know everything, just like I don’t know everything in my house and how it works, but I do know how to do basic repairs so I don’t pay loads of money for a guy to come and unclog a drain. I know how to reset my circuit breakers, how to change a fuse, how to change a lightbulb.
That’s what the terminal is. No one here is telling you to write a bootloader in assembly or meticulously study kernel environment parameters. No one advocating for basic knowledge of a terminal likely has knowledge on subnet masks, compilers, or other low level systems that a modern Linux abstracts for you.
But! I know how to update my packages from a terminal. I know how to install a package outside of a repository, or one that’s not listed on my graphical package manager. I know how to export an environment variable to get my software to work how it should.
That’s what “knowing the terminal” gives you. It’s a basic skill that unlocks you from being a mere “user” of a system to an owner of a system. I don’t think everyone will ever need the terminal, but there are people who are replying to me that seem to have a genuine fear that people have knowledge of their computers in a meaningful way.
Knowledge is autonomy for whatever you do, and there’s a reason why the most profitable of systems are the very systems that are locked down abstracted and “user friendly” in all ways that harm a user’s rights and freedoms.
I’ll coincide with you in that first-aid-quick-repairs is something people should in the best of cases know how to do, but setting a envirental variable or installing a package is not a “simple thing”. I’ve worked with engineers that programmed math models for a living that had no idea what a enviromental varible even was. Yes is easy to do, but the concept behind it, what it is, what it does and why are not simple, without the right background or the will to learn about the topic.
And, about user and owner. Sure, I get your point and personally I share it. But again, that is an opinion, tell a non-interested-user that they don’t really own their rig until they know how to use the terminal and I assure you that most of them will disagree.
Edit cause I wrongly posted before finishing:
Comparing uncloging -manually pushing and pull a bar- or chaning a light -turn left, change, then right- or a breaker -literally just pulling a tab up- are WAY simpler actions. Yes, running apt upgrade is easy, but how you know is all well? That it work? + if I run apt update everyday I see almost no diference in my system, why should I even do something like that
I think this is the bigger issue, to be honest. Like your example of environmental variables, it’s not a complicated concept, but when a guide says to set the variable for Editor rather than a context menu asking you to choose the default program to open this type of file in the future, all of a sudden, people lose their minds about how complicated it is.
Comparing uncloging -manually pushing and pull a bar- or chaning a light -turn left, change, then right- or a breaker -literally just pulling a tab up- are WAY simpler actions. Yes, running apt upgrade is easy, but how you know is all well? That it work? + if I run apt update everyday I see almost no diference in my system, why should I even do something like that
These examples don’t make sense to me as a point against using the terminal, especially since GUI package managers are a thing these days. Many upgrades are under the hood, so to speak, and don’t produce visible changes for most users, and this applies just as much to other operating systems as it does to Linux. When Windows finishes upgrading and reboots, or Chrome tells a user updates are available, and they restart it, how do they know all is good? For the most part, they take it as a given that all is good as long as there’s no new, undesired behavior that starts after the upgrade.
Just because I haven’t been exploited by a security vulnerability or encountered a particular bug is no reason to remain on a version of my OS or programs that is still liable to either of them. That’s just a bizarre argument against staying up to date.
Not to be adversarial, but Yes, I know how everything works in my house and how to fix it, or maintain it. Same as my car, or PC. i just see it as understanding the fundamentals of the world we access.
For me, the terminal is something I’ll learn once I’m more familiar with which apps I like. Until then, it’s nice to have something like pamac to help me find the thing I need.
Heck yeah I would love to never use the terminal. The terminal is the biggest roadblock for me adopting Linux. I never, ever want to open it. If I have to open it, Linux has failed for me as a windows replacement.
I want to try Linux again, and I have dipped my toes many times, but the terminal is the major block for me, a slightly above average pc user.
Good question. Should be. Stuff as seemingly simple as converting a couple dozen text documents to pdf requires it if you don’t want to sit around for an hour, clicking away. Many such examples.
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Based on my experience, I think you can. Many distros nowadays offer ways to do things without the use of the terminal. In Linux Mint, for example, you can rely solely on the Update Manager to update all installed applications and modules rather than using the terminal. You can also uninstall apps by right-clicking on them in the Menu and selecting the uninstall option. And finally, if you want to move files around, even to some locations that require root, you can do that using the File Explorer app (e.g. Nemo).
That being said, when I started on my Linux journey, I made it a point to actually learn some terminal commands, because I saw it as an important feature in Linux and a good skill to possess.
I can’t personally, but I’ve installed/set up Linux systems for quite a lot of older people, and I think only one of them ever uses the terminal for anything. The rest just… use the computer.
On the whole, they’re pretty much just using Libreoffice, Firefox and a few other bits these days. If something needs the terminal to fix, we’re already past the point where they’ve phoned me to pop round and fix it.
These used to be Ubuntu systems, but I switched them all to Mint after having endless Snap permission problems with printers, USB sticks and other peripherals. Once up and running, it’s pretty low maintenance.
I guess they don’t need to use the terminal, because I’ll go and do it if it’s necessary - but we are looking at once every few years. Not a lot of tech support needed.
On my own machine, I probably use the terminal every day.
Interestingly enough, Xfce4 has a kiosk mode. You could build a custom desktop for them and restrict changes. You then could do mass updates with Ansible or Saltstack
It’s a good plan for a more professional setup, but in this distinctly unprofessional setup, if I did it remotely, I wouldn’t get my chat and a cup of tea and biscuit :)
The author argues that you don’t need to use the terminal but constantly argues that you should. The average computer user doesn’t even know which version of Windows they’re using. Many don’t even know if they’re using Windows or Mac. Until Linux gets over the obsession with the terminal we’re never going to have the year of Linux.
I agree with the author then.
If you want a non-terminal os based on linux you just have to make something like android or chromeos or steamdeckos.
Those are and pretty popular, so I don’t know who can claim linux is “terminal obsessed” it’s just a kernel and there is a wide diversity of os based on it.
Debian , fedora , suse etc might all be “obsessed” with the terminal.
For me that’s just the obvious economical way to offer features. decent GUI costs a lot more to develop and document - so you have to have less features for a given amount of dev time. Or you have google /valve/microsoft type amounts of resources to spend.
I always thought this “year of linux” thing was a meme to make fun of canonical or idiotic tech journalists .
Is anyone realitsitcally interested in volunteering their time to win over legions of Microsoft fanboys. Fuck me sounds like hell.
And frankly the use of terminal is going to be far from the first blocker to linux adoption for those who don’t even know they’re using windows or mac.
What’s wrong with using the cli? People act like it’s some arcane dark magic…
You’re typing things in a small box here rather than clicking on icons to reply. Sometimes text is just better.
The problem with the cli is you need to memorize a whole bunch of new words and syntax in order to do anything. You also need to memorize what not to do so you don’t accidentally erase your system while using rm or cp or whatever.
Even something as simple as copying and pasting, which works the same in every single other program has new rules in the terminal. I mean, think about that. If you’re just learning bash, then the first thing you’ll be doing is copy pasting commands. But even that has the hurdle of 'oh, I guess this is the one program where ctrl-c means something else
Like, how do you look at sudo, cat, man, and apt, and think ‘yeah that’s intuitive’. And forget about multitasking, new users won’t even know how to quit most programs (is it ctrl-q? Just q? Esc? Ctrl-c? Ctrl-d? Wait how do I undo that, is it ctrl-z? Wait where did the thing go
For Vi: Esc :q or :q! or :wq or Shift+ZZ
You know not everyone likes to read a wall of text. Some people prefer watching a video than reading an article. So some people just like to use GUI than CLI, and that’s fine.
I disagree. Many people like to have control over there computer even if they don’t want to learn a bunch of new skills.
Linux isn’t for everyone but its gotten to the point where someone could figure it out if they so choose. It no longer is the unstable mess it was 10-20 years ago.
Of course.
But why would you want to!?
Dyslexia!
Dislexia* /j
Cixelsydm’i
Kinda disappointing.
The article is really trying to sell us, the reader, that using Linux without knowing how to use the command line is not only possible but totally feasible. Unfortunately, after each paragraph that expresses that sentiment we are treated to up to several paragraphs on how it’s totally easier, faster, and more powerful to do things via thé command line, and hey did you know that more people like coding on Linux than windows? Did you know you can do more powerful things with bash, awk, and sed than you ever could in a file manager?!
FFS
vimandnanoare brought up and vim’s “shortcuts” are praised… in an article on how you can totally use Linux through a gui and never need to open up the command line.Who is this written for? outside of people who not only already use Linux but are convinced that using any other OS is both a moral failing and a form of self-harm?
For clarity’s sake: I have been daily driving Linux, specifically ArchLinux, for the past 9 years, across a rotation of laptop and desktop computers. I do almost everything in the command line and prefer it that way.
I still think if you want people to try Linux you need to chill the fuck out on getting them to use the command line. At the very least, until they’re actually interested in using Linux on their own.
It is for the sake of combatting the commonly held belief that you can’t do anything without the terminal in Linux.
Progress on the accessiblility, and GUI centric applications and functionality in Linux has been huge in the last decade or two. It is now entirely possible to use a Linux system while rarely needing the terminal. And if you have someone techy helping set it up for you then it is possible to never have to.
I’ve tried to run Ubuntu, mint, Debian, and couple other distros without the terminal to see if I can actually recommend it to non-geeks. And every time, I conclude I can’t because the fucking “software center” (or whatever it’s called) is always garbage, and it’s easier to just use apt.
The only time I’ll recommend Linux to a non-tech person is when the hardware is so old that it would just be junked without Linux.
Using screenshots, demonstrate to me how the current edition of Linux Mint’s Software Manager application is “garbage” and show me how the Apple App Store, Google Play Store or the Windows Store is better.
I can agree that there are not great software managers out there, Pop!_Shop always felt like it was malfunctioning to me, and Synaptic Package Manager works but has some significant klunk, but…what’s wrong with Mint Software Manager that anyone else gets right.
no.
And there it is.
Keep in mind, most people would be coming from windows where installing software is going to some website, hoping it isn’t a fake malware site, running their exe with admin privileges, and clicking next through a bunch of eulas until it finally is done. By comparison even the worst software centers are an improvement.
Not sure if Bauh is available for Debian and it’s derivatives, but it’s an amazing software center. If anything, use synaptic on Debian. It’s much better than any software center there.
And apt is just the beginning of it. It’s not that uncommon for apt to not work either.
Specially when it’s hijacked to run other things instead (cough cough snaps).
Yeah, obviously, or the title wouldn’t even have happened.
And it’s been that way for a while now. Back when windows 10 happened, I was able to install mint, get most of my preferred programs set up, and handle data transfer with zero CLI use. Which was awesome, because my dyslexic ass would have taken forever otherwise. It wasn’t until I started putzing around for pop and giggles that I even opened a terminal.
My mom w as able to jump right in after installation of mint, and go through the gui to try things out, no issues.
I am a gui only user. AMA. I have to use command line occasionally but it’s less than once a month, if that. Im on EndeavourOS desktop for over 2 years with Bauh managing updates. My home server runs Unraid with a web GUI interface maybe used CLI twice in 5 years? They told me Linux could be what I wanted it to be. I don’t want to use command line, so I don’t!
On the rare occasions you need to use a terminal, how often is it for something completely new? Something you need to look up to understand?
Also, how often is the MAN page enough lookup, without having to sift through 17 sites than are describing subtly different things?
I find the documentation to be very good for Arch based distros. The EOS forums or Archlinux.org wiki almost always has what I need. Otherwise the github page usually has Arch install directions that are very clear. The major things I’ve had to do in terminal is just initial set up of applications, enabling things to run on startup or changing configs. For example, and this is the most complicated example I can think of. I use grub-btrfs to put my Timeshift snapshots into the grub menu. All I really had to do was 3 commands:
The first two commands start the daemon and set it to run on start up, the 3rd command is editing the config so I could use Timeshift over Snapper. Again this is the most complicated example I can think of and its 3 lines. Not only that but I was able to find documentation on two different sites. In under a minute of googling.
Endeavour is a great example for gui only users for sure.
I’ve been daily driving Linux Mint for 10 years now. The answer to this question is “for what most people consider everyday usage, you have to use the Linux terminal about as often as you have to edit the Windows registry.” And in fact over the 10 years I’ve been a Linux user, GUI tools in Linux are increasingly available, and I’ve heard Windows normies talking about the registry more.
When I started out, Mint shipped with Synaptic Package Manager, and a lot of distros didn’t include a GUI at all. Now GUI package managers are the rule rather than the exception and most have bespoke polished app store -like things. You of course can still use apt or dnf or pacman or whatever, but you decreasingly have to.
I never once touched the registry on my Win 98, Win XP, Win Vista or Win 7 machines. Win 8 required a couple registry keys to turn off that…curtain that you had to click away to get to the login screen? and a few other “tablet first” features Win 8 had, and now I hear “just go and add these registry keys to put the start menu on the left, turn off ads, re-enable right click and retract the rectal thermometer.”
Linux is becoming more normie friendly while Windows is genuinely becoming less normie friendly.
Yes you can but you often see the terminal used when helping people online. This is because it works across desktop environments and mostly across distros, however it does give the impression that the terminal is needed.
Yes, my mom does.
Mine, too!
I didn’t see anyone else mention this but, as someone who uses Linux Mint, if you are going to install software through the Software Manager, read the reviews for the app you want before downloading it. Linux Mint’s Software Manager is full of apps that are so outdated that some of them aren’t even compatible with the current version of Linux Mint. There are other issues as well, like how there are at least 20 different versions of Wine and most of them are very old versions. I’d understand if they want to keep legacy apps for the older, still supported, versions of Linux Mint but it can be confusing to use sometimes.
This 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
Edit just to give an example, an office worker may only need to use a word processor and their OS be up to date. If the user can just click the GUI to update the OS rather than typing the command for whatever package manager the OS uses, it is good enough for him. Sysadmin can give them the instruction once and done.
If the user forgot the instruction, they can explore it on their own with GUI without internet since no matter how deep a GUI config is, then there must be a way to get there (assuming the UI designer isn’t shit). 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.
I could not agree more. The number of people in here who are demanding that everyone who uses an OS understand it completely is absolutely ridiculous. I’d love to sit down and watch these people rebuild a lawnmower engine or service the compressor on their refrigerator. Hell, a shocking number of people I meet don’t know how to cook for themselves and they’re going to demand that end users be able to chroot and save a nonbootable system? Get out of here.
Ikr? “Since it interest me, it you interest you too”
It’s pretty unreasonable to expect people to know all the intricacies of their OS unless it’s their job, but I do think people could stand to treat their computer less like an unknowable magic box when they need to work with it and take a few minutes to try any basic troubleshooting at all. An example of the sort of thing I’m talking about, last year, my fan stopped working nearly as well and began making crazy amounts of noise. Could I explain to you how the motor in my fan works? Absolutely not. But I unplugged it, looked up how to disassemble it and got out my screwdrivers and opened it up to see if there was anything that I could see wrong with it. Turns out there was a lot of hair wrapped around a shaft and the base of the blades that built up over the years I’ve had it, and removing that and reassembling it was all it took to get it working fine again.
Plenty of people don’t want to put in even that small amount of time and effort to understand things when it comes to computers, which is also a valid choice of its own, but they tend to annoy me when they attribute being unable to do something to the system being too complicated to understand/use, rather than owning their decision to focus their time and energy elsewhere. There are absolutely complex programs that are not accessible for non-tech people on Linux or the BSDs, but the same could be said for Windows and Mac. In the case of the other two, people just choose the option that works for them, but with Linux, they decide ahead of time that Linux is tough and complicated and don’t even try. It could be something as simple as they want to install Debian and need non-free firmware to use their wireless card, there are people who will declare this to complicated to understand and discard the idea of using an OS entirely over a question that can be resolved in less than 5 minutes with a quick search and nano, all because “Oh, I’m not a computer person, it says terminal.”
Yeah, you do make a good point about misattributing the system being incapable to their lack of research. But people don’t like it when they are wrong/corrected most of the time. It also applies everywhere, computers just so happen to be the most prominent. The point is that people will complain about anything anywhere.
You bring up an example of installing Debian and needing non-free firmware for their wireless card. Take a step back and think how many people are even aware about the term non-free? It is quite a ubiquitous english word with different meanings in the open source community. People reading it will assume they know what it means.
The scenario when someone that is fed up with windows and decides to install debian will see the word “non-free” and attribute it to “you must pay” at glance. If the resource they used to install it mentions and clarify what non-free means, good. Otherwise, it can be a boogeyman for them and make them re-think their decision to switch.
manwould 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.You don’t need man, just type the command with no arguments and you’ll get the help message.
Alright, try it with
catBigger 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?
There is a large degree of willful ignorance. Its 2024 and the degree of computer illiteracy is astounding.
I was an 80s kid but even I grew up with computers: Atari, Commodore and Amstrad. I then learnt PCs with DOS. All pretty much self learnt from 8 years old as no one else in my family knew shit about computers so I was on my own.
These days computers are so user friendly ad practically run themselves, even Linux but the amount of people who cant perform basic computer tasks even in Windows is unbelievable. Do they even still teach computers at schools anymore?
That’s because in the 80’s you had to know computers to use them, and most people never touched them. Only geeks like you and me.
Now everyone uses a computer (at least the screen-only computer in their pocket) without knowing anything about it.
It doesn’t mean there are less people who really know how computers work. Just that now even clueless people use them.
Do you know how everything in your house works? How to repair everything? No right?
Would you be brave enough to mess with the grounding of your house, or the AC or the heaters, the washing machine, the doors? Not eveyone wants mess with every (subsystem) thing in their house/live"
Most of the people I know want their PC to work and if somwthing goes wrong they just send it to repair or ask somebody else to fix it, they don’t wanna do it themselves, which I find normal, they have little to no interesting in PCs, and that is compleatly fine.
And before someone says "Yeah, but the computer won’t kill you if you fuck up the fixing or messing, let me tell you, a “sudo rm -r” or “sudo chown -R” can fuck you system BAR, making you loose important data and info.
-…But refugee -I hear you about to type-, they SHOULD have 10921 back-ups in atleast 2542 independent locations. Yo, they don’t wanna even see the terminal, and you want them to interest themselves for data integrity and redundacy? Come on.
I didn’t say you have to know everything, just like I don’t know everything in my house and how it works, but I do know how to do basic repairs so I don’t pay loads of money for a guy to come and unclog a drain. I know how to reset my circuit breakers, how to change a fuse, how to change a lightbulb.
That’s what the terminal is. No one here is telling you to write a bootloader in assembly or meticulously study kernel environment parameters. No one advocating for basic knowledge of a terminal likely has knowledge on subnet masks, compilers, or other low level systems that a modern Linux abstracts for you.
But! I know how to update my packages from a terminal. I know how to install a package outside of a repository, or one that’s not listed on my graphical package manager. I know how to export an environment variable to get my software to work how it should.
That’s what “knowing the terminal” gives you. It’s a basic skill that unlocks you from being a mere “user” of a system to an owner of a system. I don’t think everyone will ever need the terminal, but there are people who are replying to me that seem to have a genuine fear that people have knowledge of their computers in a meaningful way.
Knowledge is autonomy for whatever you do, and there’s a reason why the most profitable of systems are the very systems that are locked down abstracted and “user friendly” in all ways that harm a user’s rights and freedoms.
I’ll coincide with you in that first-aid-quick-repairs is something people should in the best of cases know how to do, but setting a envirental variable or installing a package is not a “simple thing”. I’ve worked with engineers that programmed math models for a living that had no idea what a enviromental varible even was. Yes is easy to do, but the concept behind it, what it is, what it does and why are not simple, without the right background or the will to learn about the topic.
And, about user and owner. Sure, I get your point and personally I share it. But again, that is an opinion, tell a non-interested-user that they don’t really own their rig until they know how to use the terminal and I assure you that most of them will disagree.
Edit cause I wrongly posted before finishing: Comparing uncloging -manually pushing and pull a bar- or chaning a light -turn left, change, then right- or a breaker -literally just pulling a tab up- are WAY simpler actions. Yes, running apt upgrade is easy, but how you know is all well? That it work? + if I run apt update everyday I see almost no diference in my system, why should I even do something like that
I think this is the bigger issue, to be honest. Like your example of environmental variables, it’s not a complicated concept, but when a guide says to set the variable for Editor rather than a context menu asking you to choose the default program to open this type of file in the future, all of a sudden, people lose their minds about how complicated it is.
These examples don’t make sense to me as a point against using the terminal, especially since GUI package managers are a thing these days. Many upgrades are under the hood, so to speak, and don’t produce visible changes for most users, and this applies just as much to other operating systems as it does to Linux. When Windows finishes upgrading and reboots, or Chrome tells a user updates are available, and they restart it, how do they know all is good? For the most part, they take it as a given that all is good as long as there’s no new, undesired behavior that starts after the upgrade.
Just because I haven’t been exploited by a security vulnerability or encountered a particular bug is no reason to remain on a version of my OS or programs that is still liable to either of them. That’s just a bizarre argument against staying up to date.
Not to be adversarial, but Yes, I know how everything works in my house and how to fix it, or maintain it. Same as my car, or PC. i just see it as understanding the fundamentals of the world we access.
For me, the terminal is something I’ll learn once I’m more familiar with which apps I like. Until then, it’s nice to have something like pamac to help me find the thing I need.
The real question is: “would you want to?”
Heck yeah I would love to never use the terminal. The terminal is the biggest roadblock for me adopting Linux. I never, ever want to open it. If I have to open it, Linux has failed for me as a windows replacement.
I want to try Linux again, and I have dipped my toes many times, but the terminal is the major block for me, a slightly above average pc user.
You forgot the
/sThe real question is “Why are people so scared of the terminal, when they’re perfectly aware of and comfortable with cmd on windows?”
Are they?
Good question. Should be. Stuff as seemingly simple as converting a couple dozen text documents to pdf requires it if you don’t want to sit around for an hour, clicking away. Many such examples.
Or “why would you?”
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