this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
730 points (97.5% liked)
Technology
59599 readers
3455 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
LOL, there's no more common phobia among Windows users than the CLI. EVERY Linux discussion "BUT ZOMG CLI COMMANDS!" (when realistically a novice user can avoid them most of the time, and they absolutely are more efficient for helping someone via lemmy post or similar than figuring out what version of what DE they have and trying to tell them the 12 clicks they need to do for the same task)
No joke. Opening a command line from windows by itself is considered hacking by many. Even toggling dark mode in websites triggers that fear.
"OMG. Are you a hacker?"
"...I'm just using Powershell."
between the powershell push, wsl, and sudo for windows they are pushing command line usage for advanced users though
I can't argue with that, but I still take exception to the idea that only advanced users should be willing/able/unafraid to use the CLI. (not that I'm suggesting that you personally are pushing that viewpoint)
When you click a button, you have to read and interpret the label on that button, then hope the person who programmed it actually did program it to do what it is labeled to suggest, and sometimes even well meaning devs make this ambiguous. Plus, you have to FIND the button, which is kinda the subject of many of the discussions here in this very thread.
You go learn what ls does one time, and now you know how to list the contents of a directory. Spend two minutes each learning ps aux and grep, and now you know how to find process info for firefox (or whatever), plus you don't need to know more than the very most basic things about grep to use it to search a text or conf file for a particular string. Or learn the ffmpeg command that you use most often for recursively processing a directory full of video files, and now you don't spend 20 minutes mucking around with handbrake or whatever when prepping files to toss onto your Kodi box (I'm just pulling that one out of my butt). Hell, yt-dlp for downloading videos from just about anywhere is better than any gui tool I ever used.
I think it's totally valid for people to prefer a gui, but I find it a little foolish that so many people just seem to intentionally shut off their brain when presented with a CLI - it's different than clicking buttons, and it's not always superior, but it should absolutely not be the bogeyman that many treat it as. You can probably learn less than ten commands to just a minimal level of proficiency and get a LOT done.