Let's get real!

Archive.

You’ve heard the “prophecy”: next year is going to be the year of the Linux desktop, right? Linux is no longer the niche hobby of bearded sysadmins and free software evangelists that it was a decade ago! Modern distributions like Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, and Linux Mint are sleek, accessible, and — dare I say it — mainstream-adjacent.

Linux is ready for professional work, including video editing, and it even manages to maintain a slight market share advantage over macOS among gamers, according to the Steam Hardware & Software Survey.

However, it’s not ready to dethrone Windows. At least, not yet!

  • RivalarrivalEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    Are you suggesting users with no programming experience can simply add the flags they need to a terminal application but would be unable to do the same with a GUI because the GUI is the barrier?

    Yeah, why not? I’ll go ahead and make that suggestion.

    I mean, the terminal allows them to ctrl-c, ctrl-v a simple solution developed by someone else, even if that someone else didn’t bother to build out a GUI for applying their changes.

    The convoluted steps they would have to take to achieve the same effect with a GUI would seriously hinder the GUI-only user.

    What I am really saying, though, is that the problem of “needing to use the terminal” is not actually solved by ensuring that every possible setting can be accessed and manipulated with a mouse.

    I’m saying that the best way to solve this “problem” is by pushing the user to expect and even demand the terminal. Distros should autolaunch a terminal window at startup. Put it right out there, front and center. Invite the novice user to interact with it with friendly little toys like fortune, cowsay, sl, toilet, espeak. The insane usefulness of the various shell tools are more than enough to keep them using it.

    • 3abas@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      2 days ago

      Yeah, why not? I’ll go ahead and make that suggestion.

      What? Do you understand what I’m asking? Do you understand what you’re suggesting?

      I mean, the terminal allows them to ctrl-c, ctrl-v a simple solution developed by someone else, even if that someone else didn’t bother to build out a GUI for applying their changes.

      So googling how to do someone, copy/pasting command is better than finding it in GUI? How high are you?

      The convoluted steps they would have to take to achieve the same effect with a GUI would seriously hinder the GUI-only user.

      Again a solved problem, just make a decent GUI for your application.

      • RivalarrivalEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        Ok, I’ll try again:

        Again a solved problem, just make a decent GUI for your application.

        You are promoting monolithic design. You completely fail to comprehend Unix philosophy:

        1. Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.

        GUIs are only used for human/application interaction. They are not needed for application/application interaction. While it is not unreasonable to have a GUI for interactive input within your application, it is infeasible and undesirable for a GUI to be needed for your application to interoperate with other applications.

        Go ahead and create the GUI if you really want, but expect your users to want to call it from a shell script. Give users the capability to automate away unnecessary manual interaction, and allow the machine to take up that pointless busywork.

        So googling how to do someone, copy/pasting command is better than finding it in GUI?

        Oh, absolutely. Especially for a one-off setting that you might never look for again. There’s just no sense in wasting the time building up a complex GUI to handle every possible interaction a user could ever want to employ.

        The solution to the “problem” of “needing to use the terminal” is to retrain the user to understand how limiting even the best GUI can be, and to greatly prefer the terminal.

        So, my suggestion is, rather than try to hide away the terminal, it should be featured prominently, exposing the limitations and shortage of command line applications available to windows users. An effective, powerful, well-supported terminal is one of the major benefits of Linux.