GUI vs CLI

[dos2unix]

When I first started using Linux, there was no Xwindows. Well there was Xwindows, it was available for AIX and Solaris, but not for Linux yet.
At about the same time, I was also using BSD. It also was command line only, I don't remember if Xwindows was available for it yet, but if it
was, we didn't install it. I remember the first time we installed it, it was difficult, there were about two dozens libraries we have to compile and install. It wasn't like today, where you just click on a button and it installs everything you need. But even then, the mouse drivers weren't very mature, there weren't any hardware acceleration packages. Nvidia and AMD didn't make drivers for Linux yet. I was using a 640x400 CRT
monitor at the time, I remember when we bought a 1024x768 monitor, the GUI woulnd't fill the entire screen. It didn't know about monitor resolutions and auto-switching back then. We eventually figured out how to change the config files. It took a lot of trial and error to get
the refresh rates and monitor Hz settings right. But even when we finally got it all working, there wasn't very many GUI applications.
I think we had xClock, xNotepad, xCalc, and xTerm, that was about it. It took a little while before we had Mosaic and Netscape.
I remember the Macintosh had browsers before Linux and Windows.

Thirty years later, a lot has changed. We have GUIs for everything, NetworkManagement, DiskMangement, Office Applications,
Video players, FileManagers, etc... but it didn't start out that way. We learned the command line, because we had to.
The funny thing is, many GUI applications, really just run CLI applications in the background.

Even today, we don't install GUI's on most of our servers. The GUI takes a lot of system resources and over head.
But also we have no monitors connected to all these servers, so a GUI wouldn't really help much. I suppose you could use
TeamViewer or VNC, (we do have 2 or 3 running VNC) so for for all the rest it's just command line.

There is nothing you can do from the GUI, that you can't do from the command line. Admittedly, some things like drag and drop, copy
and paste are much easier in a GUI, but on the other hand, things like batch file processing is much easier from the CLI.
It's funny to me, to imagine people needing a GUI to use Linux, but hey I get it.

Even so, I recommend learning the command line. If you ever want to be a Linux pro... learn the command line. There's a very good
chance the servers you will be working on, don't have a GUI installed.

 

[KGIII]

Even so, I recommend learning the command line.

That'd be a whole lot to learn! I'd add a bit to that statement about learning to be *comfortable* in the terminal with the tools you need. (But that's because brevity is the soul of wit and I'm a certified moron!)

But, yeah... Learning to be comfortable in the terminal, familiar with those tools you do need, is a great way to approach Linux. I have three browser instances open at all times. I have one text application that loads a couple dozen text files open at all times. And, more importantly, I have three terminal windows open at all times.

I do a whole lot in the terminal 'cause it's easier and faster. It's also consistent across multiple distros. Other than the package manager, you can be pretty sure what works on one system is going to work on another.

My linux-tips.us site has more terminal-based articles than anything else, for just those reasons. The goal is as stated - helping people get up to speed. The terminal is my first choice for almost everything outside of the browser or a plain text editor, which is easier as I have many files open in it and can refer to them quickly.

(See what I mean about brevity?!?)

 

[CrazedNerd]

There is nothing you can do from the GUI, that you can't do from the command line. Admittedly, some things like drag and drop, copy
and paste are much easier in a GUI

I think it would be really hard to do graphic design from a CLI, you would have to enter x-y-axis values, and then hit a "show image" command or something. That's why i don't want learn the "ed" text editor, i want a text editor or word processor that's also a pager, unless i'm using "sed" of course, that's an old program but it's still very useful.

Also, no reason to look at the internet through a terminal when you have firefox! I think that would be interesting though, to be able to just look at portions of a web page and have some more advanced/faster command line internet surfer. There is this:

qutebrowser | qutebrowser

but in comparison to firefox and chrome, i just don't like it.

I wonder if there are embedded systems that don't have a command line shell at all though. Of course, that would by default mean that your actions with the OS would be very limited. Using command line on touch screen devices is actually kinda dangerous just because it's moisture activated, i guess the GUIs on those things are dangerous anyways...

 

[dos2unix]

I think it would be really hard to do graphic design from a CLI, you would have to enter x-y-axis values

For photography/painting tpe images, I would have to agree.
For CAD and architectural drawings, we have a team that does a lot of it from command line.
It's a lot easier to draw a straight line with x-y than with a mouse.
Admittedly, there are "straight line" tools in many drawing programs, but even then it isn't always
easy to get them perfectly straight.

That'd be a whole lot to learn!

ahh.. it's not so bad... only took me 30 years.. ( and I still don't know it all ).

 

[osprey]

The command line cannot produce WYSIWYG in the first instance. It can code and then use a GUI program to see it. I guess that was the stimulus to the development of the GUI.

 

[KGIII]

ahh.. it's not so bad... only took me 30 years.. ( and I still don't know it all ).

I used Unix back in the day. I used some Linux when it was still new - but I was a hobby user. My company used Linux on the servers, but they didn't let me play with those any more than I had to. (Boy, have I got stories... Remind me to tell you about the time I ran live queries on a live database, doing the whole search and replace thing... Yeah... My DBA didn't talk to me directly for weeks. Literally, weeks...)

I've since used Linux exclusively for 15 years.

The amount of stuff I don't know could fill books. In fact, it does fill books!