You’ve heard the “prophecy”: next year is going to be the year of the Linux desktop, right? Linux is no longer the niche hobby of bearded sysadmins and free software evangelists that it was a decade ago! Modern distributions like Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, and Linux Mint are sleek, accessible, and — dare I say it — mainstream-adjacent.
Linux is ready for professional work, including video editing, and it even manages to maintain a slight market share advantage over macOS among gamers, according to the Steam Hardware & Software Survey.
However, it’s not ready to dethrone Windows. At least, not yet!
IMHO as long as linux don’t have a full UI for main settings it will be difficult for it to impose himself.
I know a lot of people will say that now you don’t need the terminal but actually you do!
I am using Fedora with KDE and for instance it offers no GUI to easily create and manage user groups. You want to look at your service, stop them, start them, schedule a task… It’s all with terminal ! And I am sure there is plenty of other examples.
Don’t take me wrong, I am still a Linux user! But I would appreciate not having to look/check online to change some basic things once in a while! 😉
Yeah give the people what they want- a registry!
An effective terminal is a feature, not a bug. Every Linux problem has the same solution: search the web, ctrl-c, ctrl-v.
No navigating through “settings” and “preferences” and “tools” menus to figure out where this particular developer decided to hide that particular setting. Just copy and paste, problem solved.
That’s a bad take. Learning the bad habit of copy/pasting command and depending on the Internet to do the most basic changes to your computer is not a “feature” of the terminal. I can Google how to navigate Windows control center too.
Setting search is a solved problem, you simply search for the setting name in the UI, it’s way easier than navigating terminal flags and switches.
This assumes the developer bothered to make that setting available through the UI.
With the terminal, that isn’t a problem: You’re using the same UI as the developer.
That assumes the programmer bothered to make user friendly flags… The terminal doesn’t magically just work.
With open source, the delineation between “user” and “programmer” is arbitrary and capricious. The GUI-centric Windows approach reinforces that artificial distinction; the terminal breaches that barrier.
Are you suggesting users with no programming experience can simply add the flags they need to a terminal application but would be unable to do the same with a GUI because the GUI is the barrier? Not the logic and that the program will do with the flag, but the GUI is the barrier?
What are you saying?
Yeah, why not? I’ll go ahead and make that suggestion.
I mean, the terminal allows them to ctrl-c, ctrl-v a simple solution developed by someone else, even if that someone else didn’t bother to build out a GUI for applying their changes.
The convoluted steps they would have to take to achieve the same effect with a GUI would seriously hinder the GUI-only user.
What I am really saying, though, is that the problem of “needing to use the terminal” is not actually solved by ensuring that every possible setting can be accessed and manipulated with a mouse.
I’m saying that the best way to solve this “problem” is by pushing the user to expect and even demand the terminal. Distros should autolaunch a terminal window at startup. Put it right out there, front and center. Invite the novice user to interact with it with friendly little toys like fortune, cowsay, sl, toilet, espeak. The insane usefulness of the various shell tools are more than enough to keep them using it.
What? Do you understand what I’m asking? Do you understand what you’re suggesting?
So googling how to do someone, copy/pasting command is better than finding it in GUI? How high are you?
Again a solved problem, just make a decent GUI for your application.
Correct, a very common task for little grandmas and other average users.