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Glad I could help.
The thing is, though, that command line instructions work on most flavours of whatever distro you have running. If you have an xfce problem it's fair game to tell you where to click, but if your issue is not related to your desktop environment, giving a solution that works on most, if not all, systems that may have the same issue, is actually a good idea. No?
Also, command line allows for greater automation, has more granular control, often has more features and can be... I'm doing ain't I? I'm being a Freeza.
And many folks have headless setups
raspberry pis, home servers, VPSs, etc. It's kinda overkill to install a desktop environment on a headless box if the only reason you need it is so you can VNC into it for a simple task that could be done over ssh.
Yes! Command line instructions are often universal instructions. This is imho a huge boon for Linux.
What are these "solutions" you speak of? All help forum posts must follow this format:
"I want to do x."
"Why would you want to do x? Don't do x.".
I want to shoot myself in the foot
Why would you want to do that? Don't do that?
Why are people so rude to me? I asked a question and they won't answer it. The Linux community sucks
Yeah it sucks.
If I wanna shoot myself, let me shoot myself. Maybe I'm into that. Who are you to judge whats good for me?
Closed as Duplicate.
(the post pointed to as the original is a post from 2013 deleted in 2018)
I have no idea what this mean is even trying to say, but as someone who is trying to make the switch to Linux, it is a steep learning curve, even for the most "user-friendly" distros.
A lot of the information in forums assumes some sort of basic knowledge of code and processes which aren't readily available. I've asked a few noob questions and while there are some helpful people out there, there are also a fuck load of assholes who seem to think they walked out the womb speaking Ubuntu.
So my message to those people is, if you're not gonna be helpful, kindly keep your snide comments to yourself.
Yeah, I can confirm this. I've been using Linux for around two years at this point and having a Linux-using friend made the transition at the start way easier. Now I'm the Linux-using friend for all of my Linux-curious friends and it's great.
If gou have an issue shoot me a message, I can't guarantee anything but i'll try to help
Shoot me a message too. I don't know anything about Linux but I'm lonely.
If you're getting coding advice, you might be on the wrong forums, which can explain the snark.
You don't need to do code to use Linux. You can use Bash if you want, but it's not a necessity
Too many people expect you to know and understand gnu-utils and all the common config file, filesystem and folder structure paradigms though. Which is the problem.
The problem is that Linux nerds, myself included, are too deep in the knowledge to even think of sth. You might not know. And my way to learn the basics of Linux was breaking 3 installations and running random scripts from stack overflow without really knowing what they do.
I don't want this the way for new people to learn Linux. There must be a better way. But I don't know which one. People who think you can't ask questions because your basics are missing should shut the fuck up and go to 4chan or so.
*Advice
No wonder OP is afraid of the terminal, you can't misspell left-click.
I'm dyslexic and the terminal can be a challenge some days
Now that's a better reason for looking for a GUI solution than the OP had. I hadn't really considered how dyslexia would affect CLI usage.
It's not a universal effect. Some dyslexics or people with related challenges like dysgraphia will find the CLI easier.
Just to give you some extra impressions:
My brain mixes up all letters with the same/similar form (regardless of rotation or flip) - so I often mix up [d, b, p, q] or [a, e] or [u, n] when typing. And then I read the command 20 times over until I find which letter got mixed up, because my brain autocorrects to the right command when reading.
It helped to use the Dyslexie font in the terminal, because it makes those shapes more unique distinct. (not to be confused with open dyslexic which did not help me at all).
Also asking an AI to correct the command is huge, but takes time.
But man GUI has none of the hassle, it says what the button will do when you click it, so you click it and it does that. How wonderful is that, ay?
Also asking an AI to correct the command is huge, but takes time.
I use shell_gpt with a custom prompt bound to a hotkey that dumps my current terminal line into a local (Deepseek) AI which is prompted with some information about my system and a preferred reply format.
For example, I'll type:
rsync movies/ media server but also do it recursively
Then press CTRL+L and a bash script copies the terminal input into a prompt that requests the AI return a properly formatted terminal command which it places into the terminal input. This way I can know what I want to do and forget the exact switch or option.
A different hotkey (CTRL+O) sends the terminal input to a Chatbot prompt for one-off answers.
I'm doing a bit more on the backend now (RAG using man pages, for example) for the Ctrl L command, but I used it with a simple prompt for several months. It's like having a slight more intelligent tab completion.
"Anyway, here are terminal commands you don't understand." and after asking for clarification on said terminal commands, you are quite rudely told to read The Manual - which seems to be some kind of a holy book for these bizarre creatures - without explaining in any way whatsoever which part of which manual you should be "reading". Thankfully, only every command ever created by anyone since the very conception of these systems - which was some 50 years ago in the seventies, in a university of a country you don't live in, written in a language you don't possibly even understand all that well, possibly by someone who also didn't know the language all that well - is discussed at length and in an impenetrably obtuse manner by many different parts of many different manuals, with helpful references to other commands and concepts you also don't understand, but which are all varying levels of essential knowledge for understanding some of these commands, while different levels for others. Also if you do not grasp the essential knowledge, you might completely fuck up your system. It seems that the philosophy in playing Dwarf Fortress is found in trying to use certain types of Linux distros, mostly frequented by massive nerds with hugely inflated egos: losing is fun! Because why else would I still be using Arch (btw)? But in any case: Read the Fucking Manual (rtfm to you as well, brother)
My ego isn't that big..
I chose Arch (in 2011) because
I do catch myself saying "just read the manual", but not in a hostile way I think. When you're already in a terminal, once you get used to manuals, it's very accessible and it's quick to get what you need.
However, that usually requires you to know what you're looking for quite specifically, and that is something you can only learn through experience and study.
I'm very happy with my choice and the whole "you can easily fuck up your system" thing also works in reverse - you can just as easily fix your system. I've made a few mistakes over the years but nothing that I couldn't reverse. Just make sure you're not fiddling with partitions and boot loaders during work hours..
There is a manual pre-installed on your machine for most commands available. You just type man and the name of the thing you want the manual for. Many commands also have a --help option that will give you a list of basic options.
I should point out this isn't Linux specific either. Many of these commands come from Unix or from other systems entirely. macOS has a similar command line system actually. It's more that Linux users tend to use and recommend the command line more. Normally because it's the way of doing things that works across the largest number of distributions and setups, but also because lots of technical users prefer command line anyway. Hence why people complain about Windows command lines being annoying. I say command lines because they actually have two of them for some odd reason. Anyway I hope this helped explain why things are the way they are.
I've been using linux for ~17 years or so and I just realized the other day that there can be multiple "pages" in a manual
No, I don't want to talk about it
I run into the issue that after using Linux for so long, I forget that the basics of using the system arenโt just common knowledge. Telling someone to cat a file sounds like gibberish to most people and thatโs easy to forget.
There are also a lot of people out there who want to be hand held through every little thing which is the worst way to learn anything. A calm sea never made a skilled sailor, some stuff you gotta just figure out on your own.
Ngl, I forgtet command options all the time. Its usually just a case of looking at the man to refresh my memory.
Gnome and KDE, what's the 3rd logo
Cinnamon (Mint's DE) I think
Yea I'm wondering that too
Cinnamon, most commonly known from Mint. There are also Fedora and Ubuntu spins for it.
Been using Linux for 10 years and this is the first time I've seen the cinnamon logo lol
GUIs are just terminal wrappers. Idk what to tell you, man
Cinnamon just works
Copypasting a term command vs. 20 pages of "click here, now click there". Which is more efficient?
The one enabling people to understand and use their devices on their own. Once you can use a mouse or touchpad, you can navigate the UI. Good UI/UX conveys function. Checkboxes insert the correct configuration in the background without possibly hazardous typos.
The CLI does nothing of this for the user, to understand it users have to invest tens, if not hundreds of hours before they get a hang of all essential commands, paradigms and tools to help themselves. They have to become IT intermediates just to use their computers.
By providing a single CLI command (which, in the worst case, gets copied by a third user on an incompatible system configuration breaking everything) instead of pointing at the GUI tools most user-friendly distros already provide you do, in many cases, a disservice to the average user who just wants their problem to be fixed. They will not be able to help themselves next time for a similar issue.
The one enabling people to understand and use their devices on their own.
CLI it is.
Why does it have to be one or the other?
I, as someone who spends so much time in the terminal that I literally have a dedicated key to open it, would prefer a single CLI command. My grandma, who thinks the monitor is the entire computer, would do better with the "inefficient" GUI option
There can be more than one correct way to do something
them : Be more descriptive!!
You: more descriptive
them: pasting "be more descriptive" in every other post
I saw this other day and this happened with me too. I was having issues with brave and someone really asked why do u need brave