TUI enjoyer 😏
Terminal gang!
It does everything you need with ONE exception I’ve found: if you use it for your file manager (I do) and you find that you need to quickly select a few items based on image preview, it is not great. Now you can solve this with vifm or something, or just launch dolphin or something every once in awhile.
I use the terminal for terminal shit. File manager is not terminal shit (for me).
Have you used a terminal file manager with image preview like yazi? Or just a thumbnail viewer like lsix?
I didn’t know a thumbnail viewer existed, I will have to try. Historically I have used sxiv in tabbed mode and just tried to remember filenames which is obnoxious.
Look I just switched over from Windows, I’m new to this shit lol. I enjoy using commands while I’m learning them but mostly I just copy/paste from instruction manuals on how to install shit I want installed. Makes me feel like a master hacker.
It’s not a blank screen. It’s a canvas. You just don’t know how to paint.
I have too sneezed with a nosebleed, those are spurious allegations
Me, not being a programmer or sysadmin or whatever, booting into TTY just for shits and giggles, playing videos via mpv with -vo=tct just cause I think it looks funny
I think it’s just been stigmatized by society as a whole for some mysterious reason. Didn’t a lot of our grandmothers slashed through terminals like fruit ninjas back in the day?
Heck yeah they did! I remember going over to my grandmothers house to use Word on her computer running DOS. She used that computer to keep her personal budget, do the accounting for her office supply business, write letters, and the newsletters for her church and social clubs. No gui, just a command line and some things that we would now call a TUI.
Did AI write this? It has that weird detachment from understanding the meme format, what the people are saying, and the point of everything that LLMs tend to get just right.
um, no. The joke is that a lot of people are scared of Linux because they think it’s “just a black screen with a bunch of text”, a lot of people who are newly using Mint or the other common “friendly” distros are proud and trying to convince everyone that you never need to touch the command line, and then the more people know what they’re doing the more likely they are to just live in a terminal and not bother with anything else.
This is one of those situations where I’d have to write an essay to dive into everything wrong. I’m not going to do all that just to have you say “nu uh”. Here’s one example:
The title is “I can’t use Linux! It’s too hard!” yet the crying bell curve person in the middle is literally using Linux.
Did you mean for the title to say “the terminal”? That would change things. But that’s sort of my point, everything has this one off LLM vibe.
when people say to him “it’s not that deep!” this guy takes the diving orb to the trench
People have been misusing this template for as long as I’ve seen it. I don’t know why, but I’ve seen people write different things for the first and last person. This one, at least, doesn’t have that. What are the othee one offs?
GUI is simpler because you have to remember a sequence of steps for every action you want to take and then memorize a bunch of keyboard shortcuts and then do it all again when they reinvent their product in two weeks.
CLI requires you to learn how your system is structured and where things are located and then you create scripts that last years. Not everyone wants to put in a bunch of effort just to use their computer.
Anyways Firefox just updated and they moved “save to collection” and a few other things so now I need to relearn some stuff. I hope my other apps don’t reinvent themselves anytime soon. Every update I know how to use them less and less.
A regular user will never in a million years create a script.
With ai they can
And now they have bricked their computer.
i used AI last week to modify the characters that get produced when i type special key combinations on my keyboard. after looking with classical search engines (duckduckgo, google) for about 20 minutes and getting confused with not much of a clear answer, i asked chatgpt and got the task done in 15 minutes and learned a whole lot while doing it, because it also explained exactly why the files are the way they are.
Doesn’t matter, now that they can they will and AI won’t tell them no.
How will they transfer their pirated media to their NAS? Manually? Every time?
Oh no, I have to open a text file with a convenient list of all the settings for this application. How awful.
If it was convenient, every single GUI would just use that as a settings menu.
If it was up to me they would. Instead they have 14 layers of menus you have to click through to find what you’re looking for if they have it at all.
The only inconvenient part about using the terminal is knowing the command to get into the configuration files. Once you’ve done it a few times it’s simple. People just don’t want to do even the minor effort to learn that which is why these days we’re stuck with all these shit applications you can’t reconfigure at all.
Not seen any black screen with text. I don’t think all distros have that. I expect non IT users never get to see that.
I… what are you talking about? Those words make sense on their own and I could probably diagram them as sentences, but put together in that way they don’t seem to parse into anything coherent.
Edit: Wait, are you saying that you think there are distros that don’t have a terminal or terminal emulator?!?
I feel like there are levels of Desktop customization all linux users go through. start out with something like cinnamon or KDE or GNOME and then you go down the rabbit hole of tiling WMs with rounded corners, neon borders, funny looking panels and then eventually you’re just set on using cagebreak or a very simple version of dwm/dwl with no panel at all. And once you discover vim style navigation it’s over. The mouse suddenly becomes a relic.
I mostly just stopped obsessively fiddling with the visuals, I honed in on a good setup, colorscheme etc. and just kept using that. My period of trying flashy stuff like window transparency was very short, it can look cool but most of that stuff is way too impractical.
the only visual thing I use is opacity on focus with DWM. I prefer it over having a coloured bar around the window.
I’m a CLI enjoyer. It’s easier for me to define what I often do as a bash function than to remember which button to click in a GUI app. It’s easier for me to copy paste a StackOverflow answer than to zoom the screenshot only to find out that the UI has changed. And I’m too lazy to move my mouse when I can do it with a Neovim keymap.
Somehow I am all three of these people at the same time.
Why is it constantly booting to a black screen with text?
This is easy, just install steam and go
Ahh the beauty of this Debian server, don’t even need to get out of my sofa because I have SSH on my phone.
The HTC Dream was the peak of Phone SSH.
There was no key combo I couldn’t input, no vim mode I couldn’t use!
There was a VNC client! I could RDP to Windows machines!
I could have even used EMACS!
I mean, I wouldn’t, I’m not some kind of monster, but I could have, and that’s what’s important!
GUI has the fundamental advantage that you can mostly find your way around without having to know commands, syntax, file paths etc. That’s a huge advantage for the vast majority of users.
plus: most people learn graphically (visually) much easier than text-based. at least for me, it’s much easier to build an intuition of something if i get a graphical display of the contents in a directory. that’s why i always
ls -alhevery new directory that i enter, before i do anything else. for many people, it’s better to use GUI file explorer because you also get image previews etc. but the same concept also applies to other issues:like, if you want to configure various hardware on your machine, you open the settings app and get many icons that you can click on. meanwhile, on the terminal, there’s no clear list of things that you can even configure.
yea as much as like using the command line, I’m having a hard time remembering all the options required, especially with things i use rarely. the discoverability is just better in GUIs
Discoverabilty is the point. That’s what a GUI excels at. The focus of the terminal is “expressiveness” (I think that’s the commonly used word). It is usually clear when you need one vs the other: bulk or compound tasks, repetitive tasks, or very particular tasks are where the terminal excels.
It sounds like you might benefit from man or tldr as a sidenote. Most people know man, but tldr is also a nice to have.
Can’t and don’t want to are two different things.
