Do you like terminals or GUIs better?

I use the terminal when it proves easier than the gui :)
 



I could buy a more modern phone, but this one keeps getting updates years after I bought it and just works. I don't do much of anything on it, except some very limited browsing and then normal phone functions. It's some Samsung thing that wasn't much money and works just fine. I do play cribbage on it while waiting for something.

I miss the slider phones that had a full keyboard.

I also don't even have my phone turned on a lot of the time. I was an early adopter, due to my work. I was pretty much a slave to the phone. When I retired, I was so happy to no longer have to be available 24/7.
 
If I'm managing servers or working with them, the cli is faster and more convenient.

If I'm reading news, watching videos, word processing, surfing the web or something. A gui environment is much preferred.

Do I prefer one over the other? No. I prefer the right tool for the job.
 
In the past I have mainly worked with remote or 'headless' servers in the Linux world so everything has to be done via terminal (over SSH) I really prefer this to using a GUI for things like small file edits, moving files around, zip, exploring directories, management, program installation and updates, and stuff like that. Its just so much faster doing these things in a terminal window or using the alt+ctrl+# screens even now that I have switched my gaming daily driver to Linux :)
However, for everything else, I am a GUI person, but I am 33 and for the most part I have rarely ever used a GUI-less OS. So big file edits I use and IDE, as well as pretty much everything not listed above.
 
I miss the slider phones that had a full keyboard.
Gawd, don't tell me. Modern touch screens were not designed for big-fingered peops like me. My 2nd hone was a slider, 3rd was a flip (clamshell), 4th was a full, hard keyboard, a Nokia E5, best phone ever.
 
Both
 
It depends on the type of work that I want to do.
For browsers and graphics, I use GUI.
If I want to use a program that I rarely use, rather than searching for that program in the menu, I would type the command line.

For example:
Code:
grub-customizer

You can also browse to a specific website by using the command line:
Code:
firefox duckduckgo.com

If I need to use the sudo command, I would go for command line:
Code:
sudo wireshark
 
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To add: There are sometimes moments when you're in a directory in the console and doing something via GUI is easier, but navigating to where you are is a schlep, so you thunar & coz it's easier. Subtleties you don't realise you're doing until you notice you've been doing them for years.
 
Gawd, don't tell me. Modern touch screens were not designed for big-fingered peops like me. My 2nd hone was a slider, 3rd was a flip (clamshell), 4th was a full, hard keyboard, a Nokia E5, best phone ever.
I was one of the last people in my company to give up my crack berry... :) Touch screens typically dont work for me. I also hate how nasty something i have to look at can get because of folks grubby fingers. GUI's really have their place. I have worked with systems where a large number of devices (100's) can be administered via a single GUI. I worked with their predecessors and had to spend hours reaching out and touching individual devices. 30 minutes on a GUI as opposed to all night touching stuff is a God send.

I think it is really depends on weather you are in diagnostic / administrator mode or user mode. When I walk up to a machine to read my mail, browse the web or some other mundane action the idea of having to use a command line is not a realistic concept. I expect to get what i need quickly with the least amount of effort. I expect things to be stable and just work....
 
I was one of the last people in my company to give up my crack berry... :) Touch screens typically dont work for me. I also hate how nasty something i have to look at can get because of folks grubby fingers.
I carry isopropyl swabs like an ammo kit, lol.
 
Personally I’m a terminal junkie. You could say my condition is terminal. A terminal, terminal junkie.

Give me a terminal, tmux and vim and I’m happy all day. I can code, build, debug, grep through the codebase, or the file-system, etc etc.

In tmux, I usually have a tab running cmus - a lightweight, terminal based music player that can manage and play my entire music collection. Thousands of hours of music at my fingertips. I can set it to randomly play tracks from my entire collection, or play any album, create playlists. I can even connect to streaming internet radio stations.

I have some bash aliases set up that use cmus-remote commands to allow me to control playback and the volume. I also have custom keybinds set up in dwm that allow me to use my media keys on my keyboard to control playback too. So I can control my music from the terminal, or the gui.

Anything involving text editing, or system administration is done in the terminal. Anything that I find myself doing often, is automated in a script and ran in the terminal.

I usually only use the GUI when I’m working on graphics/photography projects, or using CAD software, creating/editing music/videos, creating drum tabs, reading ebooks/comics etc. Basically anything that typically requires a GUI. But most of the time, I’m in the terminal.

On very rare occasions, I might even fire up codeblocks or qtcreator for some Rapid Application Development using wxWidgets or QT.

Most of my browsing is done via Firefox, in the GUI. I’m not a complete psychopath!

However, sometimes I do run web queries in the terminal via w3m. Usually when I’m working in the terminal and I want a quick answer to something, without breaking my workflow and without risking any temptation to waste time procrastinating by watching funny cat videos, or catching up with social media. Ha ha!

I’ve set up a couple of scripts called duck and goog, which fire up w3m and any parameters to the script are sent DuckDuckGo, or Google as search parameters.

So if I’m compiling something and I get an unfamiliar compiler/linker error, I can use one of those scripts to quickly get more information, without my fingers leaving the keyboard and without having to context switch to a GUI browser.

As soon as I’m done, I can get straight back on with what I was doing, with no further temptation to distract myself with some of the other delights on the web! Ha ha!

So it’s more of a way to keep me on-task and productive!
 
managing my OS I prefer the terminal but when it comes to user applications I prefer using the GUI because most of those applications only support a GUI.
I tend to do the same Terminal for maintenance and sorting any problems out and GUI's for everything else.
 
i enjoy using both. The GUI is much more practical for certain things likeweb surfing, youtube,email , but the commadline is so cool, the fact you can talk directly to the kernel through it.
sometimes certain taasks are quiker through gui and others are quicker through the commandline. i have clamav (anti virus software) commanldine based and i also have the gui version clamtk. its nice to have gui options for certain programs.

the commnadline is great though for learning how linux works and computes work in general
 
i think as linux users we tend to use the terminal probably many times when we perhaps dont need to, but linux is so fun , the terminal is part of the fun! piping , combing commands , trying to come up with new wizardy!!!!!
 
i think as linux users we tend to use the terminal probably many times when we perhaps dont need to, but linux is so fun , the terminal is part of the fun! piping , combing commands , trying to come up with new wizardy!!!!!

agreed, there's something more satisfying and powerful feeling about using the terminal, lol
 
Horses for courses. The text in terminal apps useful to me:
- w3m for many news sites to read text. There are options to either see the images, or not.
- elinks for dumping text. It's excellent with frames unlike lynx.
- shell in terminal for file management.
- wget for downloads.

If one considers Midnight Commmander (mc) a GUI, I recall that, using it a long time ago, it had a undelete function which was useful.
 
I'm a bit late to this game, but I don't care. I'm gonna un-necro this necro thread. It's an interesting subject.

I'd say my daily personal computing is about 50% GUI, 50% CLI.

I can do a lot, quickly, with the CLI. I can navigate the filesystem faster in the CLI than I usually can in the GUI. I run SSH/SFTP and rsync to manage my filesystems. And I have aliases for a lot of common jobs that make running them a breeze.

I use the GUI for web browsing, word processing (not text editing), and coding. I guess the GUI also makes switching between my terminals a little easier as well.

Most of what I do in the CLI is doable in the GUI. I'm just faster in the CLI.

Oh, and I recently learned that I can do integer math in CLI (bash). So that's another CLI bonus for me.
 
Thread revived...

To be honest, bash is the reason I ended up switching over to 75% linux in terms of what's installed on my computers currently, the other reason is just aggravation and not knowing why computers don't always work the way I want them too. 99% in terms of how I spend my time on those computers...

Bash has a much more simple and human style syntax than anything CLI on windows. I had the bash interface installed on windows 10 once, but was a separate system, so f*ck that. In terms of efficiency, bash is the most useful for file management in my experience. If you know what you're doing, you can do everything very fast in bash compared to GUI, but as I hinted at before...it's not natural to remember that much. Forgetting is a pretty important aspect of sanity IMO, plus GUI has the visuals. You could use a CLI for graphical design...yet, graphical designers will never operate like this. Seri/whatever will also never replace typing. You* can read faster than listen, with better comprehension, and monotonous noises can grate the brain.

*maybe not but this is the case for a lot of people...
 
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I dont really have much of a preference.

Whatever does the job at the time.

This is Linux

I have choices.
 

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