4 ms·

I have continually contented that the terminal is the single thing eternally condemning Linux to <5% market penetration. It's not just entering text. The entir

I have continually contented that the terminal is the single thing eternally condemning Linux to <5% market penetration. It's not just entering text. The entire experience is complicated. It's a Concorde jet cockpit[1] (with no labels too), when 95% of the population just wants to fly their drone around[2]. [1]https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2566f4c91b894e4169d77133c43e927f https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-2566f4c91b894e4169d77... [2]https://media.thedroningcompany.com/images/tincy/WQZpC56vqMpSMXfkpY9gKX8LfHvldqFnXSBHW1E7.png https://media.thedroningcompany.com/images/tincy/WQZpC56vqMp...

squigz 2y ago
95% of the population doesn't need to use the terminal.
- Waterluvian 2y ago
  If you love cars, popping the hood is probably part of the experience. For everyone else, it’s the sign of a very frustrating day ahead. As computer lovers, I feel we must endeavour to remain mindful that almost everyone else aren’t like us. They’re trying to get a task done. They don’t want to maintain or talk with the computer.
  - squigz 2y ago
    > As computer lovers, I feel we must endeavour to remain mindful that almost everyone else aren’t like us. They’re trying to get a task done. They don’t want to maintain or talk with the computer. This was pretty much my point. 95% of the population isn't like us, and don't need to interact with the terminal; thus, thinking the terminal is what's keeping Linux back doesn't make much sense to me
    - Waterluvian 2y ago
      Sorry if I was vague! I was commenting in complete agreement with you.
    - shadowgovt 2y ago
      The larger issue is the times that the Linux UX goes off the rails and the solution turns out to be "You're going to have to bleat this esoteric incantation at the command line." I plugged my laptop into a second monitor the other day and, oops, for whatever Godforsaken reason it didn't auto-detect. Suddenly I'm munging around in `xrandr` to get my screens to work. To its credit, all the major desktop distributions today are making real inroads to narrowing the scope of situations where that happens. This was a much larger concern in the past, where key aspects of the user experience were still in the category "There was a command-line tool written to control it and that's all you'll ever need, dammit."
      - yencabulator 2y ago
        The alternative is "it just won't work". You too can live in that world by simply not trying to fix it. My wife's Macbook won't suspend correctly when it's plugged into a Dell monitor, the monitor going into power save wakes up the laptop. I wish there was an arcane incantation that would fix it, but no, the proprietary walled garden is well locked up, with glossy user-friendly rounded corners everywhere.
        xp84 2y ago
        This is the most insightful post in the thread -- there's definitely a false dichotomy here. It's not "have to use a terminal" vs "everything works without a need for a terminal ever" -- it's "able to use a terminal to accomplish some goal or recover from Really Bad Thing" vs "Can't Do That Thing / have to factory restore to recover". Like the way Apple Maps on my iPhone can't save the person to notify when I navigate to Home. I can save a person to be notified to any arbitrary location besides Home. With Home though, the setting simply doesn't save. I'm sure if I had a terminal I could inspect the data involved and manually fix what's wrong, but the 'Apple' or GUI-only approach simply makes that out of the question. Even better, when the corrupted data is cloud-resident I think the answer is often just that it's broken permanently unless you want to create a brand new account. There are millions of computers out there that just don't work right, or where people can't accomplish some goal they wish they could. That's the flip side of the 'terminal or not' coin. Neither is a good experience for users who aren't technical though. For nerds though the Terminal provides a great deal.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    > They’re trying to get a task done. They don’t want to maintain or talk with the computer. Computers are complex things. Sometimes, things broke and you just can't do the task. But for a knowledgeable person, you just "pop the hood", fix the problem, and then get things done. On My iPad when the Files app freeze, there's nothing to be done other than reboot to get it working again. On Linux, I could pkill a software, restart it in debug mode or go find the logs to know what's wrong. Yes, there's a difference of mindset. But I prefer the "hood" to be there instead of having it be an opaque box. If you want to get a task done, learn the software that can do it, externalize everything else (IT support). But sometimes, that software is the terminal or it's where the software is.
nine_k 2y ago
Linux the kernel + some userland without terminal is used by majority of people in the form of Android and Chromebooks. A terminal is a developer and sysadmin tool. It just so happens that most users of desktop GNU/Linux are developers and sysadmins. They are a few percent of population.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  >Linux the kernel + some userland without terminal is used by majority of people in the form of Android and Chromebooks. Exactly, so why hasn't the open source community driving free distros taken note of this? Now more than ever, people want out of Windows, but the only they step into the seat of exit craft and see the above cockpit.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    > free distros taken note of this? Gnome tries hard to emulate Apple's approach. Results are mixed, but I've seen fans of it. Elementary OS goes in the "normal users" direction, too. OTOH if something goes badly wrong, and you do need to open the hood and follow an arcane tech support recipe, you open a command line, be it Linux. macOS, or Windows. (Not Android or iOS though, where you do a reset + restore dance.) > people want out of Windows Yes, here's where they meet Steam Deck, that did take note, and just puts you into a cared-for gaming environment. It can also run a typical desktop. The hardware is proprietary, but the software is (mostly / completely?) free.
    - card_zero 2y ago
      > you open a command line Except Classic Mac OS never had this. You'd sometimes need to do arcane rituals like "re-bless the system folder", but they were entirely GUI-based arcane rituals that involved double-clicking icons, opening and closing windows, and dragging files in and out of folders.
      - nine_k 2y ago
        There was no other, simpler interface. And the whole system was much simpler (and less capable). The graphical hardware was way simpler and fully in-house, unlike the current GPUs that are third-party and evolve quickly.
onehair 2y ago
Doesn't Windows, the most popular OS out there, have a cmd.exe terminal thing? Why isn't that harming Windows? The Windows Command Prompt's default experience is worse than most if not all terminals you find on Linux systems. Even in play TTY, you're bound to find that the shortcuts the author mentioned work like a charm. To make my cmd.exe bearable I am using https://chrisant996.github.io/clink https://chrisant996.github.io/clink tl;dr You're comparing the choice of wheels on a plane to what makes planes sell more.
- delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
  > Doesn't Windows, the most popular OS out there, have a cmd.exe terminal thing? Why isn't that harming Windows? That's because the overwhelming majority of Windows usage, administration, and programming can be done almost entirely without ever touching the command-line, from Explorer.exe, Task Manager, Edge, Media Player, Paint, and built-in ZIP handling to the huge list of MMC snap-ins[1], and Visual Studio 2022. > tl;dr You're comparing the choice of wheels on a plane to what makes planes sell more. For the record, aeroplane cockpits have also gotten considerably simpler in the intervening half-century since Concorde and the first 747s. Here is an Airbus A350 cockpit[2]. [1]: https://serverfault.com/questions/158075/what-are-the-names-of-common-mmc-snapins https://serverfault.com/questions/158075/what-are-the-names-... [2]: https://cdn.airplane-pictures.net/images/uploaded-images/2016/5/10/717131.jpg https://cdn.airplane-pictures.net/images/uploaded-images/201...
  - squigz 2y ago
    > For the record, aeroplane cockpits have also gotten considerably simpler in the intervening half-century since Concorde and the first 747s. Here is an Airbus A350 cockpit[2]. I mean, aesthetically it's simpler sure, but the complexity is still there; it's just now much more digital.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    That does not match my experience, even if I also believed that myth. At one time I had to install Windows Enterprise IoT on several kinds of embedded computers, all of which had various quirks. The computers worked fine in Linux, from the first attempt to boot it, without the need to do anything special, but a customer wanted to have Windows on those. After installing Windows, there have been a lot of problems, for instance Windows was unbelievably slow, because the SSD's had a very low writing speed, but they could not be replaced with decent SSD's, because the embedded computers were certified for certain applications only with their original components. Making Windows usable on those computers has required a week of tuning and finding various workarounds by searching the Windows Knowledge Base and various Internet Forums, where many Windows users had the same complaints as me, but few were able to provide good advice about how to solve the problems. I have been astonished to discover that for every workaround I was not able to find any way to do it in any graphic interface of Windows, but all workarounds required to use in a Cmd window some obscure Microsoft command-line utilities with a lot of magic command-line options, which I did not understand and I could not find in the official Windows Knowledge Base, but which were suggested as solutions on various Internet forums and indeed they worked as desired.
a1o 2y ago
I must be doing something wrong because I can just use Home to go to the beginning of the line and End to go to the end and I am pretty sure all the things that are easy to type as just as easy to type be in Gnome Terminal on Ubuntu or Windows Terminal on Windows. The only place I need to know a bunch of weird shortcuts to figure things out is in the macOS terminal where everything is the less intuitive as possible.
Mordisquitos 2y ago
If the only Linux distributions were in the style of LFS, Gentoo and Arch* you would have a point, but as long as Ubuntu, Mint, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Manjaro and the myriad other user-friendly exist I fail to see the argument. Yes, Ubuntu has a Concorde cockpit behind the scenes and yes, I can access it on my Ubuntu work* laptop and I am grateful that I have that choice. I would hate not having that level of control. Meanwhile, my mother's laptop is also Ubuntu and my girlfriend's is Manjaro, and they are both perfectly happy "flying their drones around" without ever setting foot in the Concorde cockpit. (*) I use Arch btw
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  I have used ubuntu for 2 years now, and its the motivation for the post. Ubuntu (or really any distro I am aware of) is great for pensioners (email readers) and power users (career linux user), with a protracted and hellishly complicated experience in between (technologically adept, but lifelong windows user). True, if you just want to fly straight to one of the most popular cities, you can just enter it in the autopilot and it will go there. But if you want to go anywhere or do anything else, you better be good a googling and understanding "how to fly a Concorde".
  - skydhash 2y ago
    A better way is to get a book about linux administration (if you want an in-depth manual) or "How Linux Works" by Brian Ward. Then learn bash. Windows is pretty much all GUI (I've left before getting used to Powershell) and that works great until you want to do rules-based changes or do profiles (without using MDM) with changes snapshot. Most software have good manuals so once you've got a bit used to the linux's way, it's quite easy to adjust anything you need. And after a while, you find you're mostly using a few handful packages and you'd have their configuration saved in your dotfiles. As for packages suggestions, that's what distros are there for. Linux is all about reading.
    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      Trust me, I understand that Linux is all about reading. I also understand that it is perpetually irrelevant in the consumer computer space, despite everyone in that space absolutely hating the dominate OS. A hate that you can watch grow in virtually real time on any social platform. But that hate is focused on pushing the giant back in-line, not at abandoning that giant for fresh pastures. You know why? Because 30 years ago, someone who touched grass realized that consumers cannot, let me repeat: cannot, use an OS that is "all about reading".
bitwize 2y ago
What's condemning Linux to negligible market share is lack of preinstalls. Virtually no one used Windows, either, until Microsoft did everything short of coercing OEMs to bundle and preinstall it during the 3.x era.
kazinator 2y ago
However, GNU/Linux's better terminal experience compared to Unix could be part of the reason why it wiped the floor with Unix. When you log into a BSD box, it's like taking a time machine back to the 1980s.
kragen 2y ago
if you have a problem with gnu/linux (as opposed to android) you can usually find the solution on stack overflow, server fault, or superuser, but the solution you find there is going to be a textual command line, not a gui. gpt-4 can tell you how to solve the problem, but only using a textual command line, not a gui. text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period. always bet on text: https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40909185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40909185 documents that this is actually also true for microsoft windows on the other hand, 'always bet on text' doesn't mean 'always bet on editing your command line with inconsistent control-character commands in a mode where clicking with the mouse doesn't do anything'
- hiccuphippo 2y ago
  It also allows you to copypaste the solution, as opposed to following directions for a GUI settings window.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  But that is passionately what I hate about it. In GUI environments there are check boxes, buttons, menus and english labels for everything. With linux it's like you are copying down a sacred language and presenting it at the alter with your fingers crossed. You just changed something. Didn't fix the problem. But the change still happened. Can you undo it? Probably not without way more digging. So now you just cross another set of fingers hoping you didn't break it more, or break something else in the future. Compare to windows: I checked this box that says "disable firewall". Then hit "Apply". That did not fix my problem. I unchecked the box that says "disable firewall". Then hit "Apply".
  - kragen 2y ago
    what would be ideal from my point of view for check boxes, dropdowns, and labels would be if they were a simultaneous alternative view of a command line, or rather a configuration line. an additional simultaneous view would provide a live preview of the result of that line. but you could still type and copy and paste the text interestingly this is not too far from my usual experience with the command line. i want to compile a target, so i type `make ` and hit tab twice. i see a list of targets and pick one by typing a letter or three and tab, and hit enter. the compiler errors out right away with a c99 construct, so i add `-k` to the command line (^p spc - k ret) to see how widespread the carnage is. it's everywhere, so i add a compiler flag to the options and try again. and in 30 seconds i have a working build. or maybe i need to use a different compiler, or something, but it's easy to return to the fresh unpacked tarball or git checkout this is close to the opposite extreme from what you describe in > You just changed something. Didn't fix the problem. But the change still happened. Can you undo it? Probably not without way more digging. i very rarely do anything in text mode that is in any way hard to undo. shell commands are mostly purely ephemeral: their only effect is some text on your screen, an entry in your history file, and maybe an output file. if i want to change one, i hit ^p and change it before hitting enter. as for configuration changes, i would say that change management is actually the major strength of the text approach: you can copy configuration lines into your notes, comment out old versions in case you want to go back to them, check the whole configuration into git, diff it to see what all has changed, etc. everything can be undone in exactly the same way. everything is a controlled experiment, with the computer itself recording the configuration of each trial automatically and implicitly admittedly there are occasional exceptions, like when you're reconfiguring the firewall or upgrading debian to a new release. though current configuration-as-code systems like docker and ansible go a long way to making all that stuff just as recoverable. the server went catatonic? too bad, revert the firewall rule change and reinstall it, and 45 seconds later the problem is fixed by contrast, it's almost never obvious how to undo clicking on a command button or a menu item. even a dropdown selection is hard to undo: you have to remember what was previously selected but yeah having to read the manual and slowly piece together a working command or configuration file is definitely worse than having every option documented in the place where you choose it
jwrallie 2y ago
When things work fine, then the average person does not need a terminal. When you do have to fix something, you need a terminal. On Windows you need to touch the registry or worse. Try attaching a debugger to figure out the reason of a blue screen and tell me how user friendly it is. Finding and changing a cryptic file to fix an issue is troublesome, but if the alternative is "just works" well... you cannot blame the terminal in that case, but the problems that are showing up.

squigz 2y ago

95% of the population doesn't need to use the terminal.

Waterluvian 2y ago
If you love cars, popping the hood is probably part of the experience. For everyone else, it’s the sign of a very frustrating day ahead. As computer lovers, I feel we must endeavour to remain mindful that almost everyone else aren’t like us. They’re trying to get a task done. They don’t want to maintain or talk with the computer.
- squigz 2y ago
  > As computer lovers, I feel we must endeavour to remain mindful that almost everyone else aren’t like us. They’re trying to get a task done. They don’t want to maintain or talk with the computer. This was pretty much my point. 95% of the population isn't like us, and don't need to interact with the terminal; thus, thinking the terminal is what's keeping Linux back doesn't make much sense to me
  - Waterluvian 2y ago
    Sorry if I was vague! I was commenting in complete agreement with you.
  - shadowgovt 2y ago
    The larger issue is the times that the Linux UX goes off the rails and the solution turns out to be "You're going to have to bleat this esoteric incantation at the command line." I plugged my laptop into a second monitor the other day and, oops, for whatever Godforsaken reason it didn't auto-detect. Suddenly I'm munging around in `xrandr` to get my screens to work. To its credit, all the major desktop distributions today are making real inroads to narrowing the scope of situations where that happens. This was a much larger concern in the past, where key aspects of the user experience were still in the category "There was a command-line tool written to control it and that's all you'll ever need, dammit."
    - yencabulator 2y ago
      The alternative is "it just won't work". You too can live in that world by simply not trying to fix it. My wife's Macbook won't suspend correctly when it's plugged into a Dell monitor, the monitor going into power save wakes up the laptop. I wish there was an arcane incantation that would fix it, but no, the proprietary walled garden is well locked up, with glossy user-friendly rounded corners everywhere.
      - xp84 2y ago
        This is the most insightful post in the thread -- there's definitely a false dichotomy here. It's not "have to use a terminal" vs "everything works without a need for a terminal ever" -- it's "able to use a terminal to accomplish some goal or recover from Really Bad Thing" vs "Can't Do That Thing / have to factory restore to recover". Like the way Apple Maps on my iPhone can't save the person to notify when I navigate to Home. I can save a person to be notified to any arbitrary location besides Home. With Home though, the setting simply doesn't save. I'm sure if I had a terminal I could inspect the data involved and manually fix what's wrong, but the 'Apple' or GUI-only approach simply makes that out of the question. Even better, when the corrupted data is cloud-resident I think the answer is often just that it's broken permanently unless you want to create a brand new account. There are millions of computers out there that just don't work right, or where people can't accomplish some goal they wish they could. That's the flip side of the 'terminal or not' coin. Neither is a good experience for users who aren't technical though. For nerds though the Terminal provides a great deal.
- skydhash 2y ago
  > They’re trying to get a task done. They don’t want to maintain or talk with the computer. Computers are complex things. Sometimes, things broke and you just can't do the task. But for a knowledgeable person, you just "pop the hood", fix the problem, and then get things done. On My iPad when the Files app freeze, there's nothing to be done other than reboot to get it working again. On Linux, I could pkill a software, restart it in debug mode or go find the logs to know what's wrong. Yes, there's a difference of mindset. But I prefer the "hood" to be there instead of having it be an opaque box. If you want to get a task done, learn the software that can do it, externalize everything else (IT support). But sometimes, that software is the terminal or it's where the software is.

nine_k 2y ago

Linux the kernel + some userland without terminal is used by majority of people in the form of Android and Chromebooks. A terminal is a developer and sysadmin tool. It just so happens that most users of desktop GNU/Linux are developers and sysadmins. They are a few percent of population.

Workaccount2 2y ago
>Linux the kernel + some userland without terminal is used by majority of people in the form of Android and Chromebooks. Exactly, so why hasn't the open source community driving free distros taken note of this? Now more than ever, people want out of Windows, but the only they step into the seat of exit craft and see the above cockpit.
- nine_k 2y ago
  > free distros taken note of this? Gnome tries hard to emulate Apple's approach. Results are mixed, but I've seen fans of it. Elementary OS goes in the "normal users" direction, too. OTOH if something goes badly wrong, and you do need to open the hood and follow an arcane tech support recipe, you open a command line, be it Linux. macOS, or Windows. (Not Android or iOS though, where you do a reset + restore dance.) > people want out of Windows Yes, here's where they meet Steam Deck, that did take note, and just puts you into a cared-for gaming environment. It can also run a typical desktop. The hardware is proprietary, but the software is (mostly / completely?) free.
  - card_zero 2y ago
    > you open a command line Except Classic Mac OS never had this. You'd sometimes need to do arcane rituals like "re-bless the system folder", but they were entirely GUI-based arcane rituals that involved double-clicking icons, opening and closing windows, and dragging files in and out of folders.
    - nine_k 2y ago
      There was no other, simpler interface. And the whole system was much simpler (and less capable). The graphical hardware was way simpler and fully in-house, unlike the current GPUs that are third-party and evolve quickly.

onehair 2y ago

Doesn't Windows, the most popular OS out there, have a cmd.exe terminal thing? Why isn't that harming Windows? The Windows Command Prompt's default experience is worse than most if not all terminals you find on Linux systems. Even in play TTY, you're bound to find that the shortcuts the author mentioned work like a charm. To make my cmd.exe bearable I am using https://chrisant996.github.io/clink https://chrisant996.github.io/clink tl;dr You're comparing the choice of wheels on a plane to what makes planes sell more.

delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
> Doesn't Windows, the most popular OS out there, have a cmd.exe terminal thing? Why isn't that harming Windows? That's because the overwhelming majority of Windows usage, administration, and programming can be done almost entirely without ever touching the command-line, from Explorer.exe, Task Manager, Edge, Media Player, Paint, and built-in ZIP handling to the huge list of MMC snap-ins[1], and Visual Studio 2022. > tl;dr You're comparing the choice of wheels on a plane to what makes planes sell more. For the record, aeroplane cockpits have also gotten considerably simpler in the intervening half-century since Concorde and the first 747s. Here is an Airbus A350 cockpit[2]. [1]: https://serverfault.com/questions/158075/what-are-the-names-of-common-mmc-snapins https://serverfault.com/questions/158075/what-are-the-names-... [2]: https://cdn.airplane-pictures.net/images/uploaded-images/2016/5/10/717131.jpg https://cdn.airplane-pictures.net/images/uploaded-images/201...
- squigz 2y ago
  > For the record, aeroplane cockpits have also gotten considerably simpler in the intervening half-century since Concorde and the first 747s. Here is an Airbus A350 cockpit[2]. I mean, aesthetically it's simpler sure, but the complexity is still there; it's just now much more digital.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  That does not match my experience, even if I also believed that myth. At one time I had to install Windows Enterprise IoT on several kinds of embedded computers, all of which had various quirks. The computers worked fine in Linux, from the first attempt to boot it, without the need to do anything special, but a customer wanted to have Windows on those. After installing Windows, there have been a lot of problems, for instance Windows was unbelievably slow, because the SSD's had a very low writing speed, but they could not be replaced with decent SSD's, because the embedded computers were certified for certain applications only with their original components. Making Windows usable on those computers has required a week of tuning and finding various workarounds by searching the Windows Knowledge Base and various Internet Forums, where many Windows users had the same complaints as me, but few were able to provide good advice about how to solve the problems. I have been astonished to discover that for every workaround I was not able to find any way to do it in any graphic interface of Windows, but all workarounds required to use in a Cmd window some obscure Microsoft command-line utilities with a lot of magic command-line options, which I did not understand and I could not find in the official Windows Knowledge Base, but which were suggested as solutions on various Internet forums and indeed they worked as desired.

a1o 2y ago

I must be doing something wrong because I can just use Home to go to the beginning of the line and End to go to the end and I am pretty sure all the things that are easy to type as just as easy to type be in Gnome Terminal on Ubuntu or Windows Terminal on Windows. The only place I need to know a bunch of weird shortcuts to figure things out is in the macOS terminal where everything is the less intuitive as possible.

Mordisquitos 2y ago

If the only Linux distributions were in the style of LFS, Gentoo and Arch* you would have a point, but as long as Ubuntu, Mint, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Manjaro and the myriad other user-friendly exist I fail to see the argument. Yes, Ubuntu has a Concorde cockpit behind the scenes and yes, I can access it on my Ubuntu work* laptop and I am grateful that I have that choice. I would hate not having that level of control. Meanwhile, my mother's laptop is also Ubuntu and my girlfriend's is Manjaro, and they are both perfectly happy "flying their drones around" without ever setting foot in the Concorde cockpit. (*) I use Arch btw

Workaccount2 2y ago
I have used ubuntu for 2 years now, and its the motivation for the post. Ubuntu (or really any distro I am aware of) is great for pensioners (email readers) and power users (career linux user), with a protracted and hellishly complicated experience in between (technologically adept, but lifelong windows user). True, if you just want to fly straight to one of the most popular cities, you can just enter it in the autopilot and it will go there. But if you want to go anywhere or do anything else, you better be good a googling and understanding "how to fly a Concorde".
- skydhash 2y ago
  A better way is to get a book about linux administration (if you want an in-depth manual) or "How Linux Works" by Brian Ward. Then learn bash. Windows is pretty much all GUI (I've left before getting used to Powershell) and that works great until you want to do rules-based changes or do profiles (without using MDM) with changes snapshot. Most software have good manuals so once you've got a bit used to the linux's way, it's quite easy to adjust anything you need. And after a while, you find you're mostly using a few handful packages and you'd have their configuration saved in your dotfiles. As for packages suggestions, that's what distros are there for. Linux is all about reading.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    Trust me, I understand that Linux is all about reading. I also understand that it is perpetually irrelevant in the consumer computer space, despite everyone in that space absolutely hating the dominate OS. A hate that you can watch grow in virtually real time on any social platform. But that hate is focused on pushing the giant back in-line, not at abandoning that giant for fresh pastures. You know why? Because 30 years ago, someone who touched grass realized that consumers cannot, let me repeat: cannot, use an OS that is "all about reading".

bitwize 2y ago

What's condemning Linux to negligible market share is lack of preinstalls. Virtually no one used Windows, either, until Microsoft did everything short of coercing OEMs to bundle and preinstall it during the 3.x era.

kazinator 2y ago

However, GNU/Linux's better terminal experience compared to Unix could be part of the reason why it wiped the floor with Unix. When you log into a BSD box, it's like taking a time machine back to the 1980s.

kragen 2y ago

if you have a problem with gnu/linux (as opposed to android) you can usually find the solution on stack overflow, server fault, or superuser, but the solution you find there is going to be a textual command line, not a gui. gpt-4 can tell you how to solve the problem, but only using a textual command line, not a gui. text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period. always bet on text: https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40909185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40909185 documents that this is actually also true for microsoft windows on the other hand, 'always bet on text' doesn't mean 'always bet on editing your command line with inconsistent control-character commands in a mode where clicking with the mouse doesn't do anything'

hiccuphippo 2y ago
It also allows you to copypaste the solution, as opposed to following directions for a GUI settings window.
Workaccount2 2y ago
But that is passionately what I hate about it. In GUI environments there are check boxes, buttons, menus and english labels for everything. With linux it's like you are copying down a sacred language and presenting it at the alter with your fingers crossed. You just changed something. Didn't fix the problem. But the change still happened. Can you undo it? Probably not without way more digging. So now you just cross another set of fingers hoping you didn't break it more, or break something else in the future. Compare to windows: I checked this box that says "disable firewall". Then hit "Apply". That did not fix my problem. I unchecked the box that says "disable firewall". Then hit "Apply".
- kragen 2y ago
  what would be ideal from my point of view for check boxes, dropdowns, and labels would be if they were a simultaneous alternative view of a command line, or rather a configuration line. an additional simultaneous view would provide a live preview of the result of that line. but you could still type and copy and paste the text interestingly this is not too far from my usual experience with the command line. i want to compile a target, so i type `make ` and hit tab twice. i see a list of targets and pick one by typing a letter or three and tab, and hit enter. the compiler errors out right away with a c99 construct, so i add `-k` to the command line (^p spc - k ret) to see how widespread the carnage is. it's everywhere, so i add a compiler flag to the options and try again. and in 30 seconds i have a working build. or maybe i need to use a different compiler, or something, but it's easy to return to the fresh unpacked tarball or git checkout this is close to the opposite extreme from what you describe in > You just changed something. Didn't fix the problem. But the change still happened. Can you undo it? Probably not without way more digging. i very rarely do anything in text mode that is in any way hard to undo. shell commands are mostly purely ephemeral: their only effect is some text on your screen, an entry in your history file, and maybe an output file. if i want to change one, i hit ^p and change it before hitting enter. as for configuration changes, i would say that change management is actually the major strength of the text approach: you can copy configuration lines into your notes, comment out old versions in case you want to go back to them, check the whole configuration into git, diff it to see what all has changed, etc. everything can be undone in exactly the same way. everything is a controlled experiment, with the computer itself recording the configuration of each trial automatically and implicitly admittedly there are occasional exceptions, like when you're reconfiguring the firewall or upgrading debian to a new release. though current configuration-as-code systems like docker and ansible go a long way to making all that stuff just as recoverable. the server went catatonic? too bad, revert the firewall rule change and reinstall it, and 45 seconds later the problem is fixed by contrast, it's almost never obvious how to undo clicking on a command button or a menu item. even a dropdown selection is hard to undo: you have to remember what was previously selected but yeah having to read the manual and slowly piece together a working command or configuration file is definitely worse than having every option documented in the place where you choose it

jwrallie 2y ago

When things work fine, then the average person does not need a terminal. When you do have to fix something, you need a terminal. On Windows you need to touch the registry or worse. Try attaching a debugger to figure out the reason of a blue screen and tell me how user friendly it is. Finding and changing a cryptic file to fix an issue is troublesome, but if the alternative is "just works" well... you cannot blame the terminal in that case, but the problems that are showing up.