@LoloyD,

Thank you for your clarification. You’re absolutely right, and we appreciate your input. The title was not meant to imply that all Linux users exclusively prefer the command line over a graphical user interface (GUI).

As you rightly pointed out, both the CLI and GUI have their merits and are valuable tools in the Linux ecosystem. It’s all about choosing the right tool for the job based on your specific needs and working context.

Your perspective as a Linux user who utilizes both CLI and GUI as needed is a valuable reminder of the versatility of the Linux environment.

The article is entitled “Why Do So Many Linux Users Prefer the Command Line to a GUI?”. I did not take that into saying “…for all use cases and purposes“.

Of course, GUI is more convenient, and has its place and space for many use cases, but the same can also be said of the CLI. It depends on the working context. I never said that, as a Linux user myself, I work ONLY or MOSTLY with CLI. I use CLI ONLY when it suits my specific purpose and use cases.

This is not because the windows command line is “better”…this is a design decision of Microsoft that certain functions are EXPLICITLY withheld from the GUI, and ONLY available via a command.

This is not “to be helpful” or “increase productivity”, this is ONLY to try to prevent ignorant mistakes. Your average IT person could probably get things done just as quickly, or more so, if all of the needed functions were included in the GUI.

To your other point…I’m glad that the fact you can memorize text commands makes you feel special, and enables you to “appear smart” or obfuscate to your colleagues. But I don’t think this helps support the point of a CLI being “better”.

And how many times have I sought a “man” page, only to find that it is missing, or it has errors, or had to spend 20-30 minutes reading to understand the single thing I needed to do to take the next step?

Nothing EVER takes 20-30 minutes to find in a GUI…in 5 minutes or less, it is either there, or it isn’t.

This response makes sense ONLY for log files or transaction files.

For all other data types, which make up the majority of the quantity of information “Big Data” in the world today (images, video, audio, numeric and geospatial datasets, CAD…literally everything else), this response makes no sense at all. With all other data, you need some other application or toolset (always with graphics involved) to make sense of this data.

I would guess that you work in IT and spend much of your time with textual log files.

You know how they say, “A picture is worth 1000 words”?
That’s exactly what a decent GUI does…graphics and visual structure to organize and convey information far faster than pure text ever can….And thus speed up your understanding and productivity by 10x +.

The people who “LOVE” CLI must work in legacy systems or in IT support, where they are managing and optimizing efficiency of largely the same systems year after year. In this use case, getting very comfortable with a few CLIs and scripting makes perfect sense.

But for more general developers (especially with the speed of change in web development), CLIs can actually serve to slow every….single…step…of the process, as we have to stop and read documentation and browse multiple websites before getting the sequence of commands we need for each step. (Has anyone tried to work with with the 10,000+ separate commands of the AWS CLI? How long will it take you to get “comfortable” with them?)