IMHO The 20+ years spent trying to make a desktop version of linux has SEVERELY reduced overall knowledge of unix practices and patterns. I'm not just talking about things like automake or the contents in /bin that younger programmers never learn, but the CLI in general. A while back I was working with an intern who as struggling with using distributed linux boxes because all he knew was Gnome: the CLI was utterly foreign to him. So I find it upsetting that this "article" would even be necessary.

It is not a question of age, most of my older colleagues as an intern used desktop apps / GUI git clients and had few UNIX experience.

> most of my older colleagues as an intern used [...] GUI git clients

How old are your "older colleagues"? I'm 35 and I remember "the land before Git", let alone the time before GUI Git clients...

My first Linux install didn't have a GUI at all, at the start. I didn't have enough floppy disks to download all of the Slackware A, N, and X packages, so I downloaded A and a subset of N onto floppies, which let me bootstrap PPP so that I could start downloading the X packages to get a working GUI going. That was on 33k6, and only when my parents didn't want to use the phone, so it took a while...

But if you had to do something now on some alien OS that you didn't know the internals of, wouldn't you prefer a GUI?

Contrary to everyone else here: hell yes, every single time.

GUIs are discoverable, and have lower friction for first time users. Example : a video codec GUI will always be easier to use than ffmpeg. I still Google how to use ffmpeg after 10years , and I have to read the entire man page because I don’t know what I don’t know! Is there a newer, better option to this flag available? Like lame for mp3s (another great example), a man page which (used to?) start off with bitrate options, but at the end says; forget all that, just use --preset. Or imagemagick, which decides to go for undiscoverability gold and split their entire program up over multiple binaries so you now get to read multiple man pages! After you guess what the names of those programs are, of course.

Hell. Give me a gui for any unfamiliar task, any time.

Of course, were I encodig movies every day, I’d be singing a very different tune.

Edit: another example: I resize images about once a week and I still have to google imagemagick’s convert. I keep forgetting how to resize to known width, keeping height ratio. It’s so frustrating that I’ve just given up and sort of guess with % instead, until it’s close enough. Not to mention resizing to a desired file size (is that even possible? With a gui, at least I’d know if it were at all. Now I’m just tired of reading the man page. I give up. Imagemagick wins.)

That is more a product of complexity thou.

The other day I was doing some basic data collection and graphing, with the initial version being done in Excel, for something as basic as adding a trendline I had to resort to googling the answer, and following a sequence of several click this, then click this style to get what I needed.

Turns out it was actually easier to understand how to do what I needed using python matplotlib (not a CLI program granted).

Design, documentation and managing complexity are far more important to discoverability than GUI vs CLI.

it's not cli, it's the way it's designed.

had a pervasive semi structured fuzzy matching at the OS level so anybody writing a program can have a good completion without resorting to shell generators and enjoy easy discoverability.

GUIs are easier to explore right now but they also have lots of hidden state and obscure organization (good luck knowing which options interferes with who and where they are some times)

It's my responsibility to organize things such that what I need to do matches up with what I know how to do. If I need to do something urgently on an alien OS and I don't immediately know how to do it, the failure doesn't lie with the OS. Why am I not using an OS that I know better? Why don't I have time to read the documentation and understand this alien OS?

Your job is also to do work in the future. You should be prepared for the future.

That's really not how it works, though. Even fast food workers get training on the software and tools they have to use.

My job, as an infrastructure engineer, is essentially to figure out how to fit together parts that 1. I've never seen before today, 2. which have never been fit together before, 3. well-enough that nobody will ever need to touch the weld-point again.

There's no training that can prepare you for that, except for training in how to train yourself in something, quickly.

No, that would be the worst of all.

You'd have to hunt around for things, hope that whatever you were doing didn't have weird unpredictable effects, and was repeatable. While you could write down everything you typed, and some precis of what resulted, or even in some cases record the result (eg ssh-ing to a machine from inside an emacs buffer or something like that.

That depends on the built in help mechanism. If I was unfamiliar with linux and it was linux, maybe. It it was OpenBSD and I was unfamiliar with it, I could probably get everything I needed (for core OS stuff at least) purely from the man system, as long as I had some very basic idea of how to use the shell. OpenBSD has exceptional man pages, to the degree you probably can't understand until you've spent a few hours reading through some of them.

Personally I'd go for the old school, yet very reliable, way of R T F M.

I think the closest you can get right now is TempleOS. How do you feel about it?

The answer is yes for all, as ASCII encoding for videos is a thing.