I know we all enjoy being nerds and using commands (H4ckerman). But now that everything is either a gui or web based, is there really any use to terminal commands?
For example, on windows I never used powershell or cmd hardly ever. I realize now I probably could have. But Linux just drives me to use it more, which i like anyway (because let’s be honest, it makes us feel superior)
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Absolutely!
First, terminal is, for the most part, distro- and DE-agnostic. Unless you use something specific to the distro or DE (like package management or working with DE dependencies), what would work on one Linux system would also work on the other. This allows you to immediately get a grasp of any Linux system.
Second, terminal is fast. You can search through GUI for all eternity, or you can type one line that does what you want, saving tons of time in the process.
With that said, both GUI and terminal should develop hand in hand to provide a user experience that suits both regular and power users alike. Windows commonly shifts to the side of regular user, while making it harder for power users to do what they want. Linux as it was in the old days shifted towards power users.
Nowadays, I think Linux finally strikes the right balance - it is accessible and powerful at the same time.
There’s a sweet spot between CLI and GUI: TUI.
It’s easier to automate.
For programming it’s essential.
Could you elaborate ?
I’ve always wanted to get into coding but what ive watched/read on something like godot or VBA was all clicking certain boxes in the gui and didnt interest me much. Are you saying like python and scripts ? That makes sense. I have no clue what programmers actually do since ive never been able to find something to apply it to
In Linux, GUIs are almost always a front end with limited options for a CLI. Also, with CLI you can chain commands to get even more control.
You’ve got plenty of examples of how the command line is more than jus a “cool” way to do things. So I’ll address a couple other issues.
On windows you are discouraged to use command line because that way windows gets more control over what you can do or can’t do. Remember windows is not a neutral piece of software, it’s a company’s business model. On Linux there’s no reason to impede using the command line, all the power to you.
(because let’s be honest, it makes us feel superior)
I don’t know if it’s because of my autism, but this strike me as odd. Do people really think like this? I have a certain expertise, that’s computers, and I can use a bunch of different tools to the best of my knowledge to do things. I choose command line or GUI depending on how easy the task is to do in each or the time it takes. Not everyone is trying to show off, it’s just the best tool to use sometimes.
Yes, just making a joke, however when anyone sees me use Linux even for basic stuff they freak out that im hacking. So the cliche still stands strong.
Good point on windoze!
The meme of people feeling superior for using CLI is 30 years old. What you have from op is lazy, out-of-date humor. Like sure, there have always been and will always be a minority of people that upon learning a small bit of something will brag about it (in this case how to use a CLI), but mostly it’s just boomer humor. I wouldn’t take it seriously that there are any people of note who feel superior for using a CLI.
Ah I see, thanks for the explanation. So my autism is not to blame, I’m just out of the loop. I mean, yeah, it’s always funny when you see in a movie they put a command line tool just to make it look like someone is a R34L |-|4c|<3r and they are just doing ls and cd but never really knew it was a thing in general too.
I guess I’ve earned a woosh in the OP’s joke.
IT guy here. The CLI is not something I’d expect the average computer user to use at all. However, for power users and professionals it’s a force multiplier at least, and a prerequisite often.
There are several reasons for this. Firstly, IT system and server administration, in the cloud or your own hardware, is often done via the CLI. This is because it’s not that common or convenient to hook up every server in a rack to a monitor to click on stuff. But dialling into it remotely via SSH or even a serial port to perform bootstrapping procedures, troubleshooting and even routine management tasks sometimes, is very quick , easy and reliable.
The other main reason is automation. If I buy 10 servers to power my website, they all need installing and configuring a whole bunch of software, e.g. an Apache web server, DNS, SQL, Active Directory, AV, firewall, networking, and a host of other services. Now imagine doing all of that by hand. You don’t even need to be a professional sysadmin installing server racks for a living for this to be important. Even if you run a couple desktop/servers/Raspberry Pi/NAS at home, they’ll need updating, upgrading or replacing every once in a while. Having to click your way through everything every time you need to (re)configure them gets old very quickly.
GUIs are extremely poor at providing a consistent, predictable, automatable way to do things. They force you to do mostly everything manually and be present to supervise the whole thing. With the CLI you can script out pretty much any task and let it run in the background while you go do other things. I really don’t see CLIs going anywhere anytime soon. I’d say it’s actually the opposite. PowerShell was Microsoft’s way of acknowledging this very fact years ago. The primitive Windows Batch scripting language wasn’t cutting it for anyone, especially Windows Server users who had to painstakingly configure every Win Server install they did manually through a GUI wizard.
Pipes etc.
A GUI can’t combine commands from several different programs and move data to and from and use that with the ease and explicit nature of a terminal.
GUIs can use pipes just fine. You tell it to write to a named pipe or similar device and the program on the other end will happily consume it.
Some GUIs
GUI: ~5 mouse buttons / wheel functions Terminal: +102 keys
Do you unplug your keyboard to use a gui or something?
Even outside of scripting and so forth, which I use a lot, often it’s far easier and faster to just cook up a wildcard string or a regex or whatever when you’re faced with a folder with eleventy bazillion files in it, only some of which you’d like to move somewhere else.
Yes, you could point-and-click on all of those for the next hour and a half plucking them all out of your file browser window. Me personally, I’d really rather not.
Other similar use cases abound.
depends on what you want to do with your computer? If you want to deeply get into the internals of your computer, including writing your own software, then you’ll probably have to touch the terminal at some point. If all you want to do is web browsing or photo editing or something, then you might never need it.
For me the most important aspects of terminal commands is that (1) you are forced to learn how your OS really works and (2) the terminal will always be able to do things that your GUI isn’t programmed to do.
For example, I use brew commands to install brew packages on bazzite because there is no GUI frontend available. I also use it to start ollama LLMs on my machine even though there is a GUI frontend available, because I don’t need a frontend for two commands.
It really depends on what you mean by “the real world”.
The most common use for Linux is on servers. For this scenario, not only does the terminal make sense, but it’s often required as there is no GUI installed.
For Linux on the desktop, the terminal is very much analogous to Windows PowerShell. More casual users can ignore it for most purposes, but may sometimes need it for troubleshooting.
If you are trying to say that you “know” Linux, say for career development, you absolutely need to know the terminal. Nearly all professional roles will require it.
On windows, sfc /scannow, dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth, and dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase are pretty much required to prevent that mess from blowing up…
I’ve also had to use the command line to do some Exchange 365 stuff like forcing immediate archive population on 100% full inboxes whose users refused to delete any emails from…
I have yet to find a gui that allows me to do the equivalent of running a find command with a regex to find specific files and run a set command to search and replace a string in one go.
On Windows, there are a bunch of search programs like Everything that can probably do the search. For search and replace, most text editors like Notepad++ can do that.
