• utopiah@lemmy.world
    5·
    31 minutes ago

    If you

    • need discoverability, or
    • don’t need anything composable

    then sure GUIs are great.

  • whelk@retrolemmy.com
    2·
    15 minutes ago

    It’s pretty cool how both GUI lovers and terminal enthusiasts can have a great time using Linux

  • Matriks404@lemmy.world
    4·
    2 hours ago

    I like GUI’s, but I prefer them simple and customizable, so I eventually want to switch away from KDE Plasma to just some window manager.

  • Pope-King Joe@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    4 hours ago

    I still do updates and most package installs through my terminal, but anything else I look for a GUI solution. I’m lazy.

    • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.todayEnglish
      19·
      6 hours ago

      Seriously! I can do shit in the terminal, but I grew up post DOS and it’s nice to just click something and have it work.

      • Doomsider@lemmy.world
        12·
        4 hours ago

        Meh, I mean you are not wrong.

        What is even better though is knowing that whatever you click on is just inputting a command you could do yourself manually into a terminal. Now that is some cool full circle shit that Windows fucked up by hiding the CLI.

        • 1995ToyotaCorolla@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          4 hours ago

          I remember waaaay back in the server 08-08 R2 days, you could do something in server manager (such as installing a role) and while that process was running, you had the option to see the powershell command it was running in the background. That was pretty cool

    • Bunitonito@lemmy.world
      5·
      6 hours ago

      Good GUIs are awesome. It’s just that you often cede control to a bunch of fucking idiots who somehow think if it’s not broken absolutely destroy everything that made anyone love it in the first place. ‘They’ll adapt’

  • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
    12·
    6 hours ago

    I like good GUIs. There are GUIs that are clean, responsive, well designed, and full-featured.

    Sadly, that is rare nowadays, regardless if the software is FOSS or not.

    It seems like for proprietary software, the corporate approach is to design slow, boring GUIs that lack most/all advanced functionality. It’s designed for dumb users who just want to click and swipe.

    FOSS on the other hand rarely has full or even part time UI/UX devs due to the cost. So often the GUIs are clunky, messy, and a horrible pain to navigate. The upside is that they usually have extremely deep features, but good luck finding them.

    If I have to pick, FOSS all the way, but I wish I didn’t have to. There are a few FOSS programs that have very nice UIs, Bitwarden, Protonmail, Musescore, Godot, and many are getting better, but the landscape is still rough out there.

    As for CLI, I prefer it for some things, it’s just faster depending on the function. I find myself operating with a hybrid setup now days. I have become proficient enough with the command line that I can switch seamlessly between my GUI environments and the CLI-only environments. I don’t really think about it much anymore.

    • Zannsolo@lemmy.world
      2·
      4 hours ago

      It’s a user interface. Users are fucking stupid this the interface needs to be fucking stupid. When you have to put that much in to stop stupid the interface suffers.

      • Shanmugha@lemmy.world
        1·
        24 minutes ago

        Why stop stupid but not users?

        Allow me to illustrate (c, Johny Silverhand):

        • user fucks up
        • starts complaining
        • just plain tell them they got exactly what they told the software to do. End of story. Wants to quit - good luck
  • pedz@lemmy.ca
    16·
    7 hours ago

    I’m undecided with modern GUI because most modern software is just a web page now. And it will offer you a choice between boring light mode and boring dark mode.

    I miss the days of GTK2 with hundreds of themes. It was one of the main reason I switched to Linux; the customization. I don’t know how many hours I must have spent on gnome-look.org. Now I don’t even bother to try new themes and just use Fluent-Dark. My desktop is boring and looks like everyone else that has a dark mode. I really really miss GTK2 and all my favourite themes I can’t use anymore. I tried making my own and played around with Oomox but it’s not the same.

    But one thing that I do prefer to be GUI now is IRC. Now that there are web clients (sigh) that can display images and videos directly in the channels, chatting in text mode only is kind of annoying with all the links we are sharing.

  • Assassassin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    932·
    10 hours ago

    I think people are just too rigid sometimes. Some workflows are better in GUIs, some are better in CLIs. They both have upsides and downsides depending on what you’re doing, and it’s totally fine to prefer one to the other. Just don’t let your preference keep you from learning and using other great tools!

    • DreamButt@lemmy.worldEnglish
      19·
      9 hours ago

      personally I think having that all cli all the time phase is really important for a developer. Those that I’ve worked with who exclusively use gui’s just don’t have the same understanding of their system. Which is maybe fine at a certain level but not for a senior dev

        • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip
          91·
          7 hours ago

          Can we add repeatable? CLI is repeatable and self documenting with nothing more than a text editor.

          GUI? Good luck with that.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
    119·
    10 hours ago

    Good GUI are hard to make while a good cli is rather easy.

    Nothing wrong with a GUI that does what it needs without fluff.

    • toebert@piefed.socialEnglish
      901·
      10 hours ago

      The cli has one other benefit which I think is rarely recognised: it’s pretty easy to tell someone you need to run “xyz -a -b -c” (bringing the safety risk with it to be fair), but it gets a lot harder to be like “so in the top left there is a cog button that opens a panel on the right where you’re looking for the 2nd tab and there’ll be a checkbox”.

      The things I appreciate even more than a good gui are programs with a good gui and a cli.

    • FunkyCheese@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      281·
      10 hours ago

      Tbh a lot of things are just easier to show/explain with images and icons in addition to text.

      And in many cases mouse control is just super handy and fast

      And while a terminal can show all these things… its just not comparable, IMO.

      I wouldt want to write my job application in the terminal, or design a product, or whatever else requires just a smidge of graphics

        • qqq@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 hours ago

          Yea that made me laugh; I just updated my resume from LaTeX to typst a few months ago actually

      • Programmer Belch@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        3·
        7 hours ago

        I’m just a faster typer and when I have to go back to the mouse controls I feel sluggish. Of course, the right tool for the right job, I will never find myself with a tui to manipulate 3D objects or editing images but I will go to vim for editing documents using latex

    • BartyDeCanter@lemmy.sdf.org
      7·
      6 hours ago

      So true. I mostly live in the embedded world but have had to write GUIs from time to time, mostly to connect and send commands to some sort of embedded device.

      I always start with a cli version for testing and then write the GUI. A quick wrapper around the comms library and I’m done.

      But there are so many annoying fiddly little details in the GUI to deal with that it usually takes as long just to write the GUI as it does the entire rest of the code. Layout, menus, tooltips, icon choices, dealing with screen sizes, DPI, resizing windows, responsive data, etc.

      Edit: A simple example that I’ve dealt with many times is reading and writing config data. For the CLI version it’s typically two commands:

      ‘tool read_cfg’ reads from the device and prints the config to stout

      ‘tool write_cfg’ reads a config from stdin and sends to the device.

      Add a ‘-f’ option to use a file instead of stout for people that don’t remember how to use redirects. Add a couple of documentation sentences to the help command. If there are any issues, print them to stderr and bail. If the user wants to edit the config they can use whatever $EDITOR they prefer.

      The same functionality in a GUI means that you have to first implement an editor for values. In my case that was generally a bunch of nested key/value pairs so I could probably find a widget that would work. And then understand how it handles being resized, gets styled, uses tooltips, etc. Of course there would need to be some code to get the data into and out of that widget which would probably need massaging. Then I need to let the user know if there are local edits. And then there is the fact that the data is now in three places, on a local disc, on the device, and in the editor and I need to communicate with the user that there is a difference between loading and saving from disc vs the device. Do I give a warning that loading from once place will overwrite anything they’ve changed in the editor? How do I make the four load/save buttons have obvious icons? And how to handle errors? An annoying pop up? Partially load the data? Something else? So many little things that have to be designed, implemented, and tested.