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I was thinking about this today - that is: a terminal (“minimal”) setup may well have prepared those of us who practice it - for remote work (great news if a pa

by bch 6y ago

I was thinking about this today - that is: a terminal (“minimal”) setup may well have prepared those of us who practice it - for remote work (great news if a pandemic strikes!) I wondered though, if there’s no way to objectively “score” the advantage of, say, terminal-minimalism vs. GUI-maximalism, what might some discussions of t-min vs GUI-max be? What, if anything, does t-min really cut us out of while we’re preparing for the rare case of “Ok, imagine you’re stuck on a spacecraft with only a character terminal and a 300baud modem - what will you do then with your Windows RDP-available machine back on earth?” Am genuinely interested to hear people’s ideas of the calculus here.

nbwl 6y ago
Pros of t-min: - overall greater speed using a computer, you become what people call a "power user". - some sysadmin knowledge. Adopting a terminal based workflow requires to tinker with your system (systemd, sh scripts, building certain repo for a tool you want etc.). Pros of GUI-max: - You don't have to spend hours learning and configuring things. - Certain tools are just better when they are built out in a GUI for you. I think here in particular of C/C++ debuggers, it's hard to get a nice experience in the terminal. As for objectively "scoring" it's hard to assign real values. You could eventually measure speed. I have worked in production support solving a lot of benign problems on a day to day basis. This is when I adopted my terminal based workflow. It was way faster than my other teammates using desktop apps.
- desmap 6y ago
  > You don't have to spend hours learning and configuring things I got 70% of my sysadmin skills because of hanging out 24/7 in the shell and configuring things.
- bregma 6y ago
  > You don't have to spend hours learning and configuring things After spending hours, sometimes days, trying to learn GUI stand-ins and trying to configure them (turns out you usually can't unless the GUI designer though it was a good idea), I usually give up and go back to being productive instead by using the CLI.

by bch 6y ago

nbwl 6y ago

Pros of t-min: - overall greater speed using a computer, you become what people call a "power user". - some sysadmin knowledge. Adopting a terminal based workflow requires to tinker with your system (systemd, sh scripts, building certain repo for a tool you want etc.). Pros of GUI-max: - You don't have to spend hours learning and configuring things. - Certain tools are just better when they are built out in a GUI for you. I think here in particular of C/C++ debuggers, it's hard to get a nice experience in the terminal. As for objectively "scoring" it's hard to assign real values. You could eventually measure speed. I have worked in production support solving a lot of benign problems on a day to day basis. This is when I adopted my terminal based workflow. It was way faster than my other teammates using desktop apps.

desmap 6y ago
> You don't have to spend hours learning and configuring things I got 70% of my sysadmin skills because of hanging out 24/7 in the shell and configuring things.
bregma 6y ago
> You don't have to spend hours learning and configuring things After spending hours, sometimes days, trying to learn GUI stand-ins and trying to configure them (turns out you usually can't unless the GUI designer though it was a good idea), I usually give up and go back to being productive instead by using the CLI.