It's like, when you install arch, you just feel like not bothering with installing the gui stuff, because you're so above pointing and clicking on things. If only they'd make a command line version of Metro Exodus. Metro Exodus on the command line would be so much more powerful. It's so lame with graphics. Don't get me started on editing my photos of the kids and fam. Just load that pic up on the command line as raw data. I'll just eliminate the red eye reading the machine code and editing it. GUIs are for weaklings. Just install arch without X or gnome or any of that stuff. Don't even get me started on the KDE wussies. Oh yeah, you want things to look all pretty on your screen to click on. Computers aren't pretty. They take commands. All you need are fingers and a keyboard. You can play tetris on the terminal, you know. No need for graphics. The linux devs just added graphics and a GUI for wussy users. Even invented that penguin thing to make it pretty and dumbed down.
77.. btw
19Arch with gnome? cursed, I say
4Libcaca renderer for Metro Exodus would be… intriguing.
4
I've started to feel dirty clicking on icons like some sort of peasant.
30I don't mind a batch/script. But give me text over fancy GUIs any day
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25You know what, i just drop my personal list of noteworthy shell-tools here (note directfb2 and twin). And edir, clipboard, pass and portal/croc for the win.
alternatives
GUI alternatives
- draw: mouse drawing on the shell!
- imgfb: Draws a farbfeld or jpeg image to the Linux framebuffer
- baca: TUI e-book reader
- Terminal Image Viewer (tiv): what it says
- FIM: framebuffer image viewer -;derasterize: cli pixel to ANSI converter cli video playing: mpv --gpu-context=drm
- ts-polkitagent: Polkit Agent for the Shell (old)
- fbterm: framebuffer terminal
- twin: Textmode WINdow environment
- directfb2: framebuffer desktop
- csv to ascii art table via python pandas
Task Management:
- dun: note-taking & task manager
- cubby: encrypted note taking to cloud, with markdown
- girok: TUI calendar
Services:
File Manager:
- clifm: nice shell file manager with tagging
- nnn: cli fm with split-view file preview
- TUIFI Manager: cli fm with rendered images in 2D layout
- xplr: hackable, minimal, TUI fm
Login Manager:
Others:
ease of use
- edir: rename with text file
- clipboard: shell clipboard manager & more
- portal: cli file transfer agent between computers
- croc: simple file transfer tool via local server, Android Appp too
- transfer.sh: cli file sharing via cloud
- detox: file name cleanup
- ouch: simple de/compressor
- mnamer: intelligent video renamer
- gum: bells and whistles for shell scripters
- pytermgui: bells and whistles for python scripters
If someone has more/better tools, please shout.
18Do you know about any way to render nerd fonts in framebuffer? That's actually the only thing stopping me from using only terminal in most cases.
2
But it's actually better!
I know it's easy to think that it's about showing off, but honestly, the Linux graphical tools are much worse than the command line most of the time.
Installing software is much faster and more reliable using the command line than any graphical tool I've used.
24It really depends.
For formatting drives i.e. i much prefer the GUI.
13Nothing can beat GParted imo
6Gparted is nicer for some stuff (have fun resizing a partition without it, for example), but for basics it's hard to go wrong with cfdisk IMO. Or even plain fdisk. Very useful to actually know how to use that if you don't have access to gparted, e.g., system recovery or install, and cfdisk is super easy to use too.
4Yeah that I agree with.
3
It also has an easy explanation:
- Programmer wants to solve a problem, writes some functions, can call them from main()
- Programmer is also Sysadmin, can't be bothered compiling stuff for every simple thing, so adds a CLI parser to call the different functions from main()
- End user wants a GUI... but Sysadmin already has all they want on the CLI, so maybe someone puts up some GUI when they're bored, or it really, really, really makes sense... or end user is SOL
6
What gives me real power is sudo.
21I totally dare you to install Arch without ever creating another account. Just reboot as root and use the computer as root forever. Despite all the warnings against it.
9
Seems like a lot of Linux/programming memes basically just stem from a place of real noob insecurity. "I can't figure out how to quit vim!" "CLI is scary!" "Arch users say 'I use arch BTW'!" No offense to the noobs, it's just that, you know, people use this stuff for an actual reason. Yeah, vim requires you to be in normal mode and hit :q or even (gasp) :q! to quit sometimes, it's also a hyperflexible editor that lets you program super powerful functions, macros, do dirt-easy regex replacements, etc. Including binding Ctrl-Q to quit if you really struggle with that.
18Permanently Deleted
13
As a person who uses terminal almost all the time, this is sort of true. The real power comes with automations.
18I dunno. There is something empowering whenever windows-super users find out you (almost) never have to reboot to update.
(Just for the kernel, then all it is, is a reboot. I like windows where it requires installation while booting- actually.) (Okay, so I just run the command line on startup automatically. You’re right.)
9I prefer the magic of "installing the new OS" without formatting or formatting your OS while "keeping your user config files"
1
/bin/bash
1/bin/zsh
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The nicest aspect, for me, is that I rarely need to do something just once. So while I sometimes prefer a GUI workflow for a simple one-off, if it's something I may end up repeating, then I'd rather have a command-line approach which can be chucked in a shell script, run by cron, or easily invoked over ssh on my phone.
But for highly interactive things (e.g., reading email), I'll stick to GUI solutions like a pleb.
17Linux is so awesome because of scripting and automation. It's just there, an expected thing it wants the user to do. My favorite thing about automation and scripting is how you can write a script in the terminal and make it part of the GUI experience. Everyone has their own preference about how to edit a file. I've been writing scripts since the 1990s, so I'm just used to doing that in the terminal. The OS has evolved since then so much. So, I write up my script in the terminal, then I turn it into something I can click on and run when I need to, on top of scheduling its execution. I think that's really special and unique about Linux now. Mac OS was like that in the past. It got less so over the years and Apple made it harder for the user to do this. Linux has maintained this type of thing that has always been since UNIX and I really think it is a driving force for the future of computing. It now stands as the only OS that allows the user to customize his or her experience through scripting as a totally functional and integrated aspect of the OS. You don't have to do anything special to get scripting to work. It comes to you this way. You just write your script. You decide how you want to execute your script, which can even include executing it in the GUI if you want. Microsoft Windows never had this and is desperately trying to catch up, but in order to do it on that OS, it's very clunky. Linux right now is the only OS available that allows you to do exactly what you've described. You only have to do it once if you have the know-how. And it's just there. No special things to install or create.
7
A dirty linux admin here. Imagine you get ssh'd in nginx log folder and all you want to know are all the ips that have been beating againts certain URL in around last let's say last seven days and getting
429most frequent first. In kittie script its likefind -mtime -7 -name "*access*" -exec zgrep $some_damed_url {} \; | grep 429 | awk '{print $3}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r | lessdepends on how y'r logs look (and I assume you've been managing them - that's where thezgrepcomes from) should be run intmuxand could (should?) be written better 'n all - but my point is - do that for me in gui(I'm waiting ⏲)
16As a general rule, I will have most of my app and system logs sent to a central log aggregation server. Splunk, log entries, even cloudwatch can do this now.
But you are right, if there is an archaic server that you need to analyse logs from, nothing beats a find/grep/sed
4In splunk this is a pretty straightforward query and can be piped to stats count and sorted. I don't know if you'd exactly count that as gui though.
3
Sometimes I think about installing linux just to feel smug about it
11You should. It feels great to install Linux on things.
11
I know it's faster and even easier for many things, but it's with great shame that I would rather mess with network interfaces via GUI than on command line.
nmtuiis a poor substitute.7Nmtui is a godly creation, there is no better way no setup NeworkManager
2
The next level above that is installing a keyboard-driven window manager like i3. That’s where the dopamine really comes from.
7Finally ditching Apple's "Music" player for MOC after watching Apple dismantle/bury basic features over the last decade.
6It's not about power but about usability. Most GUI tools are worse software, somewhere. Example: Evolution Mail and Foliate (E-Reader) just stopped working for me, because they somehow get bubblewrap to want to open something in /root/.cache (which fails), which is just silly.
5I greatly prefer Krita with a GUI.
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4My absolute favorite is nnn (mine's aliased from "n3", is that insane) -> "r" which gives you a vim console for renaming all the contents of a directory. Beats perl-rename and everything else cause it's actually interactive. Although it is possible to write files over each other with it, so gotta be careful.
In the default view you literally just use the arrow keys to navigate, basically the same as the old Windows tree explorer or whatever else like that. 1/2/3/4 flip between tabs. If you hit "right" on a file I think it hits xdg-open or something to open it in the default program. "e" opens text in your ... default
EDITOR? Guessing. "?" for help and a lot of other commands.3Also, ddd
1
Also, the scale is logarithmic.
3Rings true for Mac users too.
And windows, to some extent.
3I wish I was better at using the terminal. I'm running EndeavourOS as my daily driver, so I use it a lot but I wish I was even more comfortable with it. Are there any good crash courses available for noobs?
2Linuxcommand.org is a great start. Writing shell scripts and using cli programs for things you actually need and will use will greatly accelerate learning. I stopped using a file manager entirely to force myself to learn how to get around, then switched to neovim from vscodium, taskwarrior instead of Obsidian Tasks, termdown for timers, etc. A tiling wm makes the transition easier imo because you can have many terminals open for visual multitasking. Like with anything, you'll get better faster if you just do it a bunch and don't be afraid to mess up and get your hands dirty.
2
a>strongbad_email.exe
1Honestly sometimes it just feels right
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