My brother is 12 and just like other people of his age he can’t use a computer properly because he is only familiar with mobile devices and dumbed-down computers
I recently dual-booted Fedora KDE and Windows 10 on his laptop. Showed him Discovery and told him, “This is the app store. Everything you’ll ever need is here, and if you can’t find something just tell me and I’ll add it there”. I also set up bottles telling him “Your non-steam games are here”. He installed Steam and other apps himself
I guess he is a better Linux user than Linus Sebastian since he installed Steam without breaking his OS…
The tech support questions and stuff like “Can you install this for me?” or “Is this a virus?” dropped to zero. He only asks me things like “What was the name of PowerPoint for Linux” once in a while
After a week I have hardly ever seen my brother use Windows. He says Fedora is “like iOS” and he absolutely loved it
I use Arch and he keeps telling me “Why are you doing that nerdy terminal stuff just use Fedora”. He also keeps explaining to me why Fedora better than my “nerd OS”
As a terminal fan, my main reasons for preferring them over a gui (for some tasks) are:
- It’s faster to type than to navigate menus
- If I don’t know where something is and can’t guess it instantly, it’s usually faster to search for it in a man page than randomly digging through gui menus
- You can combine commands with each other with pipes or
$() - You can search through your command history to find previous commands
- You can write scripts and aliases to automate common tasks
- The terminal requires less context switching. Typing ten commands is less mentally taxing than opening ten different guis
The barrier for entry is higher with terminals but unless you need visual feedback (e.g. because you’re editing an image) it’s easier and faster for both common and rare tasks.
Well some if those are only true for smie people. Add in a vad case of dyslexia and it get real hard to kniw if what you just tyoed is correct, and does any cli have a spell checker.
Fair enough, I’m not against people making guis as well for people who prefer them for whatever reason, my point is that people don’t just prefer terminals because of elitism or something. I imagine terminals can be better than guis for some disabilities as well.
yeah. you can change font size / change font on a terminal much easier than many GUI applications. and terminal is going to have that same standard apply to everything
from what i understand, there are fonts for people with dyslexia
There’s this aptly-named utility that I’m currently using:
https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck
I do think GUI is the way to go for “typical” usage, but if you wanted to set up a faster way to run a command you use often, you would create an alias to handle a complex command or something you do often.
For example, I have ‘updateall’ as my command to run ‘sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade && flatpak update’. Why not GUI for this? I like to see what’s going on during my updates. It’s also kind of satisfying for some reason.
Anyway, I suspect your problem then would end up being not running a syntax, assuming it even exists, but the correct syntax, which I often encounter, but that’s what ‘history | grep’ is for.
