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I always felt that Powershell was a solid indication that the whole GUI-isation of the world that started with such a bang in the 1980s has been an impossible t

I always felt that Powershell was a solid indication that the whole GUI-isation of the world that started with such a bang in the 1980s has been an impossible task to complete. For something as complicated as Windows Server, there is not enough time to build GUI screens and OLE/COM/DCOM interfaces for every little flag, function or feature. Microsoft must have realised this quite some time ago. The evidence? That even Windows 11 contains ancient, crufty GUI screens from Windows XP and older. It turned out the Unix guys were right all along. There is nothing wrong with the core of Windows as an operating system, but the baggage it carries mostly due to all those failed GUI screens makes it inferior in practice to Unix based systems. I have one powershell script I use, which is something that manipulates an Outlook mailbox. It's unreliable (thanks to Outlook) but again demonstrates what a pointless idea the entire Powershell project was and to a certain extent what a dead end things like systemd will eventually end up being.

yarg 4y ago
If you're building screens for every set of configurations that you're defining (and doing it a lot) then you're doing it wrong. If you can specify some sort of schema for configuration in general, then the screens can generally be generated. You generally don't want or need to display different instances of the same sort of configuration property in fundamentally different ways. I think that what you get from a (decent) GUI is discoverability of features, whereas what you get with the CL is specificity. The former makes computers accessible to the masses, the latter provides power to administrators.
- kjellsbells 4y ago
  Reading this discussion I'm wryly reminded of IBM AIX and it's smitty tool. It let you administer AIX unix from a GUI, but always emitted the equivalent CLI command, as if GUIs were just something it hoped youd eventually grow out of.

yarg 4y ago

If you're building screens for every set of configurations that you're defining (and doing it a lot) then you're doing it wrong. If you can specify some sort of schema for configuration in general, then the screens can generally be generated. You generally don't want or need to display different instances of the same sort of configuration property in fundamentally different ways. I think that what you get from a (decent) GUI is discoverability of features, whereas what you get with the CL is specificity. The former makes computers accessible to the masses, the latter provides power to administrators.

kjellsbells 4y ago
Reading this discussion I'm wryly reminded of IBM AIX and it's smitty tool. It let you administer AIX unix from a GUI, but always emitted the equivalent CLI command, as if GUIs were just something it hoped youd eventually grow out of.