Linux

Used the terminal yesterday to search my ~~piracy~~ drive full of movies and shit in a directory structure, find any duplicate files by size/md5, and then it piped the results into my terminal editor of choice where I commented out the lines corresponding to files to delete, then it deleted them for me. Saved a couple hundred gb, and idk how to do it through a gui (besides the insurmountable task of clicking through all those folders.)

Not only that, but turned out I had a bunch of dups in my image folder too that I wasn't prepared to deal with right then, so in vim I just :/folder and n n n n repeatedly to get to the next relevant entries, made it even faster.

Took maybe 5min (not counting wait time, I ran it, made dinner, and came back and it was ready for me.)

Now, I'm going to peek at that forgotten picture folder in the GUI because I have NO idea what's going on there and it'll be helpful for me to get eyes on it instead of reading filenames, so I do use that too, for me it isn't all or nothing, it's both, some things are just better CLI and some are actually better GUI, and some can be either depending on how I feel today.

GUI change but the command line lasts forever. The GUI will change from version to version for any program but if you have a script or CLI that will last.

I rarely use powershell or cmd in Windows because they’re just terrible. I’m never sure how I’m supposed to do things with powershell. Documentation online rarely help me. I end up always installing WLS to have a decent experience (before WSL it was Cygwin, CMDer, Msys, etc.)

In Linux it’s so good I’m almost always having a few terminal windows open. I’m mostly using it for text processing. For example, check how often a specific keyword is used among 1GB of files. I can easily string a chain of commands together, and get a result within seconds.

yes, it's faster. I use neovim and doom emacs so all my navigation is vim style. Therefore I absolutely hate using a mouse now and I find navigating a gui a chore. I mean like unzipping a file is easier, copy and pasting is easier, making a file, directory, whatever it's just faster via a terminal.

On Windows, I used to install stuff using winget install whatever.

Waiting for the MS Store to load was a freaking anxiety needle injected into my veins. Unacceptable.

Bazaar on the other hand, it's glorious. Blazing fast. So, I go with a GUI.

Also, there are tools like pandoc, ghostscript, caddy, imagemagick, and a gazillion others that are very powerful and quicker to do their job than waiting for a GUI to load.

And then, sometimes, there's just no other way. Maybe it's part of installing or updating something, or stuff like that. But a casual will either wait for a GUI, or just not do that.

I don't think using the terminal is aspirational, it's practical and it's value is clear.

When I would develop on windows I used the terminal a lot and it's not really changing. Guis are great for something's but when you're working with things that have to run without a gui, there's just no substitute to a terminal. I'm not using a terminal cause it makes me feel cool. It's just the only tool for some jobs. Not because a GUI hasn't been made, but because a purpose made GUI for the task would be a waste of time and not as good.

Its a window into the actual internals of the machine. I would say yes, its one of hte many ways linux sets itself way from Windows. And its VERY lightweight. Some linux distros dont need it, some do.

Heck even MacOS has a terminal app. Just because

All day everyday. Why click through a GUI when I can slam out a command in 1/4 of the time to see what my resources or doing, or if something is acting weird. Watching logs tail in a terminal is always going to be faster and smoother than GUI as well. Debugging things as well.

I don't use the terminal often (outside my job where I'm using git commands or launching code) but when I use it it's generally for things that are almost impossible with gui. Troubleshooting network issues or boot issues or searching for files. Fuck, sometimes I can't even get to a folder I know is on my computer without a terminal.

I’m not sure how else I’d configure the servers and networking equipment I’d use, and I have no idea how I’d deal with Kubernetes cluster management without CLIs. I haven’t used Windows in ~15 years but going back to its GUI all the time? Fuck that.

There are only a couple of things that I like a gui more than the terminal.

It makes sense for scripting. You can build a process in a file to share among yourself and various devices or with friends to do a certain task on an automated basis.

Even on Windows this is useful to schedule a task in Task Scheduler.

Maybe every Monday, you want your computer to restart. A really quick and basic bash could be written to “shutdown /r /t 0” I can’t remember the exact command and then that file gets executed in Task Scheduler at the specific time you want.

There are other uses like having a file set to rename files. I do this often for my Plex server because I like a specific naming convention on multiple files and to do it quickly.

It’s nicer than GUI because everything can be laid out for you in a manual as to what you need as simple commands and much easier to guide someone because it’s not “click to the far right, no not the side of the screen, but slightly far right and then click this icon that looks like a pineapple but is actually a microphone and then click the icon…” Whereas a command line is just “type in shutdown and then enter y when prompted” and “these are all the available commands and what they do”.

I will say GUIs are nicer for hiding Easter eggs, but also a few devs seem to enjoy making useful features like Easter eggs where I am just now finding out that a button to the far left of the screen has existed and does this useful function. I don’t have that issue in command line tools that have even the most basic documentation.

My mate installed Linux Mint the other week. (Yay) I don't know how Mint is different from Bazzite, or what file manager he is using, but I know enough terminal to show him how to mount his old hard drive and save some files from his windows partition.

depends on what you want to do with your computer? If you want to deeply get into the internals of your computer, including writing your own software, then you'll probably have to touch the terminal at some point. If all you want to do is web browsing or photo editing or something, then you might never need it.

There's a sweet spot between CLI and GUI: TUI.