Well, I’m arguing for the common non-IT people. It’s also more often than not less about complexity, but intuitiveness paired with a lack of knowledge (which is okay, as long as it’s well designed it’s okay not to know how a clutch actually works but still wanting or needing to drive a car).

For power users the whole discussion obviously shifts as it’s reasonable to expect them having both the interest and time to learn stuff.

Your package manager commands and options and some basic tools to troubleshoot local networking are really not that fucking hard.

Who are you trying to fool, yourself or others? Setting up networking in the CLI isn’t even remotely as simple / straightforward as you make it seem for the common user. Package manager commands are reasonable, however also by far less enticing to most people than a graphical software manager that shows all information at a glance. Especially if you look for something for a certain purpose instead of a specific name.

Just realized that person above wants that. Was too focused on the part you quoted, my bad. That’s indeed outlandish.

You were absolutely right about everything up until your very last sentence.

We need a distro that comes with GUIs for everything indeed, but shipping without a terminal would be both a bad idea and would cause the distro maintainer to go up in flames immediately.

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We got to approach this nuanced though. Yes, a strong stance against all the enshittification (incl. dark patterns and all that) is absolutely necessary to preserve the good things most Linux distros have in common. For example once KDE e.V. and the Gnome Foundation have finished their work at the payment backend for Flatpak repos we absolutely need to bolster Flathub + a handful of others (to avoid centralization) so they become a default, and through that are able to enforce a strong “no bullshit” moderation as companies are trying to “capture the market”. This will be an inevitable shitshow as Linux-based OS’ become more popular.

Meanwhile we have to admit that not providing comprehensible and well integrated GUIs for everything - and that includes stuff like Bootloader settings, Systemd Services Management, sysctl configuration etc. - is a shortcoming that should be remedied in the future. On rare occasions even average users will have to open these things, and it’s way better if they do so through an environment they can understand and navigate. Anything else is just gatekeeping.

Linux should be accessible to everyone - that includes normies as well as those who may not be mentally able to understand or memorize CLI. This fear of enshittification is understandable in our current landscape, but it absolutely doesn’t help if it stifles development towards more user-friendliness. After all nobody argues to take away the CLI in any capacity, just to add another abstraction layer for those who either need or want it. Which, assumably, are most people.

Because a GUI conveys meaning, because humans are intrinsically better at memorizing shapes and location than some random abstract characters that do not mean anything to then unless you use them all the time. Because a System Settings panel with submenus and descriptions on their checkboxes and sliders is the manual AND the option simultaneously, small “?” with hover-over information boxes make it optimal. A GUI can go so far to turn completely red to signal dangerous settings, the CLI will happily oblige in whatever stupid command you enter. Hell, even god damn APT had NO option to warn users that they’re about to uninstall core system components until a big Youtuber like LTT had his distro blow up in his face. And STILL there were those people who tirelessly argued against a god damn warning… and colored text.

GUI is by design better at guardrailing, meanwhile in the CLI a single wrong command with sudo in front can destroy your entire OS.

I can’t fathom how this isn’t painfully obvious to anyone who thinks about this for even a moment…

You guys seem so utterly disconnected from the common user’s perspective it’s not even funny anymore. Expecting everyone to learn all those CLI tools and system components they may encounter… I hope you guys are also mechatronics engineers if you drive cars, botanists if you have a garden and at least intermediate chefs if you own more than the most basic kitchen.

Please go out and talk with some people who’re NOT into tech about this stuff, it’s a sobering experience.

Ah, the classic “CLI commands are universal” nonsense. Isn’t even true with poweruser distros (look at Alpine or Nix), but neither with common ones. But I’m sure reinstalling grub on a systemd-boot distro can’t be that bad, right? Here, quickly install something to fix that. Oh, your distro doesn’t apt but pacman/dnf/zypper/whatever? Too bad, don’t know those. Wait, why is that config file missing? Oh, your distro saves it somewhere else, sure hope you didn’t copy some script from the internet that now failed halfway through!

Surely after copy-pasting all those commands the other person has learned something to help themselves next time, other than that they’re utterly lost on Linux without the help of others. This will definitely make people use Linux instead of going back to the exploitative OS they know where they at least feel comfortable enough to know it won’t fail on them.

Cars are meant for race drivers.

Sure you can use them to just buy groceries but that’s not their strong point. /s

There’s a lot of work being poured into Flatpak, which is the way to go forward (most likely coupled with immutable file systems in the future). If this work is done as well as more people contributing to the big desktop environments as Linux becomes gradually more popular there’s a good chance we’ll see steady success.

But even then this whole culture has to change, and people need to stop lying to themselves how “CLI commands are universal” and such stuff (there are way too many differences between distros). Anyone who, instead of pointing to the corresponding disk utility, by default starts to describe parted or /etc/fstab to people who didn’t asked for the harder CLI way is actively alienating people. Not to mention who, in utter unhelpfulness, respond with “why would you want to do that” or “RTFM”. As if that’ll help anyone (also the manuals are utter garbage as they’re almost always written using high-level terminology expecting knowledge no newcomer will understand).

It’s indeed “alles extrem belastend”.

Lol okay, just enter a command from the internet you don’t understand. What can possibly go wrong? The learning isn’t about being able to enter something, but to know what not to copy and paste. Just executing commands from the internet is the fastest way to fuck up your computer, to use the CLI regularly you have to understand what happens. And to do so is something that grows over years; years of broken systems, at least if you wildly enter stuff from the internet.

This is not good enough if we ever want Linux to be mass adopted. And expecting it is even worse if this is to ever change; In my many years being into Linux I read outright warnings for e.g. Linux Mint users to not ever look for help outside of Mint forums because of this culture. Which is ridiculous, it shouldn’t be this way.

No. This may be the case for some distros like Gentoo or Arch, but applying this to the whole ecosystem and expecting everyone to even be interested in computers (which they should not fucking have to be to use a user-friendly Linux) is what alienates people.

You should not have to learn for years before being comfortable using a computer. If everyone has to do that it’s not something that will be adopted widely, as we can obviously see with Linux on Desktop. It’s both a Software problem (either lack thereof or bad design) as well as a culture problem; the latter is what I criticize, because it’s so utterly unnecessary and alienates common people.

And the Windows Shell really isn’t comparable, it’s 100% optional.

Only on consenting adults who have the ability to reasonably reject the offer (so they’re not forced into it for any reason, like money). The guy in the picture did it on babies, so… if you want to do it on yourself go ham, but that wouldn’t be fair. Animal experimentation is bad enough.

Then just unpack said flatpak, there are tools for that.

We somehow avoided that, luckily.

I had the pleasure of getting sold a cheap power supply though. It was rather fascinating to learn that, indeed, even burning hardware can still provide sufficient power to play games (for a few seconds).

I remember the funny lines on the back when I accidentally bumped into the tower or had the subwoofer on as it was burning.

Also holding down on the close-pin on a discman (so it would keep spinning the disc) and differently coloured sharpies were a great way to colourize your collection.

During some practical school training (basically two weeks where pupils are send to work in companies full-time without pay) at an electronics shop, someone brought in a Windows XP machine that caused problems. Heard that sound so often…

Turned out they still ran it without any Service Packs. Windows Update also refused to work… and it was registered to those fine people called “Skidrow” (the cracking group). 😅

At that time those registration cracks already supported Windows Update, they should’ve updated that one!

Congrats! Be aware that Windows loves to wipe foreign bootloaders though. If your computer suddenly can’t boot Mint anymore but goes right into Windows, that’s another way of MS screwing with you.