this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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My biggest complaint about Linux is how literally everything requires you to do some arcane magic in the terminal.
Just make it a button damn it. As it is I just copy and paste what I'm told into the terminal so you could have just added a button into the operating system that just did that behind the scenes.
Literally everything? Hardly anything requires a terminal these days. The only reason tutorials tell you to use a terminal is because they don’t know what GUI you’re using. You can usually do the same thing in the GUI.
Not to mention that the terminal is just so much more efficient for a tutorial than that whole 20 screenshots with circles where to click nonsense. 20 screenshots you will have to redo when the GUI designer inevitably decides to do a "redesign" because they are bored and want to justify their existence.
Regardless of the reason the problem remains that there is no consistent design distro to distro and that's a problem for the end user. If we're ever going to have "year of Linux" then the developers are going to have to get over themselves and stop with the idea that everyone who is going to use their platform is technologically inclined.
Otherwise it's always outgoing to just be for the techies. Can you imagine your grandparents trying to use Linux and then looking stuff up on their own and then doing something wrong because they don't know what distro they're on? Nightmare.
My mom is in no way technically inclined. Quite the opposite in fact. (She’s in her seventies, so it’s understandable.) She's been using Ubuntu since 2015. My dad used to try to switch her back to Windows once in a while, and she’d yell at him that she hated it, then he’d switch her back. My dad finally came around a couple years ago after getting a Steam Deck, and now he uses Fedora.
Funnily enough, since Ubuntu and Fedora both use Gnome, they have the same interface. I also use Fedora and Bazzite. All of these OSes use Gnome. They all have the same interface (when Bazzite is in Desktop Mode).
So, really, I don’t know what you’re on about.
You might have had a point if you wrote that back in the days before phone UIs and Windows versions and websites all completely redesigning their UIs every 5 minutes but this is clearly nonsense at this point.
No, actually the actual nightmare is them using Windows and asking me about it on the phone and me having to talk them through mouse clicks in an unfamiliar GUI instead of just telling them which command to enter in the terminal like I would on a sane OS like Linux.
There is no problem. Yes, they pretty much are consistent distro to distro. Desktop to Desktop is a bit different but not by much.
My grandparents have had a much easier time with Linux than Windows. Both environments would be confusing to look up if something goes wrong. Fortunately since linux packages are updated together, not much goes wrong. Cant say that for windows. Stuff is always popping up and asking questions and changing.
I cut my teeth on Linux when red hat was trying to make things "user friendly" with control panel like guis but they consistently couldn't do what I wanted so I had to learn the terminal anyway.
25+ years later, I'll use a gui if it works and it's easy, but I still have trust issues that I don't have with a config file. You put shit in a config file, it's going to do what you asked (right or wrong) or sigterm trying... And I appreciates that.
That said, I do mostly gui config on my daily driver these days. Servers however... No gui, no problem.
Why is this repeated over and over on Lemmy? It is nonsense.
There is a button. You don't need the terminal any more or less than any other OS. Yes people give advice with commands. They are not magic nor arcane, but it is so much easier to tell you to do a command than 20 pages of diagrams and drawings on how to use the gui to do the same thing.
The good thing is that most of those "arcane magic things" in the terminal can simply be copied and pasted into said terminal. Whereas finding an obscure option on a windows program setting three requestors and five buttons deep is a nightmare, especially if your UI is not set to English.
I don't think that is a particularly fair assessment. ZorinOS for example has been our home OS for years now. No terminal required.
It's a dying problem, but it's gonna take a while to finish dying off. Linux is currently mostly used by more technically capable people, so avoiding the terminal has historically been a lower priority compared to getting things to work at all. I think that's changing as things get increasingly stable and usable with support for popular things like gaming. Once that base functionality is there, more and more attention will turn to polishing the UI and finding ways to hide the terminal.