I understand the desire to want to avoid the command line, but you're severely restricting your ability to troubleshoot by doing so. Every operating system has a terminal and command line, and there's going to be cases where you'll want to drop into a shell to do something that has no GUI equivalent.
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)
Linux
53618 readers
57 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
I dont think you should habe to learn to usw the terminal in order to debug your operating system. If i would switch my mom to Linux, i dont want her to have to use the terminal. So making life easier for those people would grealty improve the appeal of Linux to tech noobs. By arguing we need the terminal for Linux, we gatekeep people from trying and using Linux, if they are afraid of technology
Yeah I am not suggesting an entire terminal replacement, which is unreasonable.
Coming back to this with thoughts. What you're describing sounds a lot like a menu tree.
"Press 1 to do this, 2 to do that, 3 to go to submenu A, 4 for B," etc. 1
"You have pressed 1. Do you want to turn on option ABC? [Y / n]" Y
"Do you want option QWERTY47? [Y/n]" N
"Are you sure you want to run notthebees --abc --no-qwerty47? [Y/n]" N
"Aborted."
It sounds like a standards problem waiting to happen because no two menus will be alike, but hey, things like this can and do exist, and setting one up isn't that hard, only time consuming.
Something like this can kind of be achieved programmatically by unraveling bash completion arguments and loosely parsing terminal help strings.
They aren't all formatted uniformly though, so you'll need to come up with a filtering mechanism to prevent returning garbage. You'll also always be a little out of date...