Linux has GUIs for any setting you could need.
Windows has the registry and random PowerShell commands from the internet if the setting is even something you can change.
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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Depends on what Iβm doing. Some things I prefer cli. Some things GUI is easier or quicker. Thereβs no wrong way to do anything.
I like GUIs if they aren't web browsers pretending to be a desktop applications.
Depends on the GUI. I love having GUIs for things, but I might have a hard time deciding between using CLI to launch everything and using GNOME.
Is this a meme or a picture you choose. Either way, I love it! And I feel with same by the way.
π§ oh boy, I guess I get my senior citizen's discount now!
Don't let random nerds on the internet make you feel any way about how you use Linux. Live your life and be happy. There's too much bullshit in the world to pay attention to jerks with keyboards.
I do too! Most of us do to some extent. If I can right click on a network icon in my taskbar and get an IP, that's cake!
But then, it doesn't work on my friends box, and it's no there after an update, and when I search for how to do it all I see is the way it used to work or i'm told it's somewhere that doesn't even seem to exist.
Gui's change, vendor to vendor, update to update, they're poorly documented, and have the most chance of being wrong or missing features.
Use your GUI's as long as they give you what you need, but learn your CLI, because it almost never changes, is well documented and works for you and all your new friends that have abandoned windows no matter which linuxy way they went.
I get CLI users, sometimes using the cli is faster and more efficient.
However I have had frequent discussions with people (all of them also avid CLI users) that set up infrastructure as code. I prefer the super understandable Gui of a tool like octopus deploy over hundreds of yaml files whose content can only be understood by doing a year long deep dive any day.
They always use the same two arguments: Infrastructure as code allows you to rebuild your entire software deployment from scratch, and the code can be versioned, thereby providing an audit trail for deployments.
In decades of software development I have exactly had to redeploy an entire network from scratch 0 times. If you're in that stage the cause is most likely hardware and re-provisioning that will probably take the bulk of your time.
About the versioning: I'm not arguing against storing deployments as yaml files, but writing them by hand is insanely inefficient. There should be a nice GUI that generates and writes these yaml files, so you don't have to know every option an value and every validation rule by heart.
Also, I am relatively certain that a tool like octopus deploy also has auditing of who deployed what software in which location.
To me the power of IaC is less in "I can stand this whole thing back up a single deploy" and more "The entire history of every configuration decision and change I've ever made is right here, not buried 4 submenus deep in a "new enhanced ui".
When we're being audited for security/privacy/legal compliance, I have one source of truth to look at, and when it gets changed, those changes get peer reviewed just like any other code change, and git history is a great audit trail if you use decent commit messages.
Also, knowledge transfer and onbording is way easier too, here's all our infrastructure, here's the rules surrounding how it gets updated, yes you will be fired if you break them. Here's the docs regarding how to write this code, and here's some handy formatting and validation scripts to help you along the way.
Doing it by hand in the console is fine if you have full confidence in your ability to hand over the project to another human on your way out the door, but when it comes to that one hacky workaround you had to implement with no documentation due to the limitations of your in-house apps, you're probably forcing the next guy to rediscover why you did it that way by breaking it half a dozen times on the next deploy after your departure, rather than just noticing the inconsistency in the IaC, then looking into the git blame and mumbling "heh, that's dumb".
Burn them! π₯π₯π₯π₯
Use what makes you happy. I codify a bunch of my python shit with Textualizer (so that guifications can be used), and it makes users happy. Its not my choice, but if the user likes it, ok then.
I CAN interact with CLI, but i WANT to interact with good GUI. I don't want to learn CLI commands when I don't have to. Especially in the cases where I use it rarely
Are you kidding? There's nothing I love more than hand typing a 400 character file path.
Yeah and that's totally fair enough, but people who like using a command line and know the tools well rarely if ever have to type out long paths or commands. Tab completion and history suggestion (especially in a modern shell like fish or zsh) is a joy to use, and doesn't just do file paths but command options and arguments. Man pages are very overwhelming at first, but if you're practiced at scanning them, then it's a lot more convenient to get the info right where you are than to navigate to another window. But the learning curve is steep and I get why someone wouldn't want to bother.
Tab?
let's compromise with a TUI
They are good for discoverability, but suck when you have to do the same thing 5 times.
-- signed, a guy currently having to use a GUI to update the firmware on 5 headsets, and put our standard settings on them
The best compromise is to have a right click menu option that copies the cli command for the function you are trying to perform.
I like tuis
Call me a hater, but TUIs are just filler for the modern wm ricer. I see new ones pop up everyday lol
rtorrent!
hater!
(but for real, I love a well-done TUI. Scriptability of CLIs is nice but sometimes the in-between of a good interface while remaining embedded in the shell works so well. Something like vifm allows me to zoom around with fzf, select things by regex or rename with vidir, move and package with rsync or tar, all without ever leaving my terminal context)
hater!
Can't say I didn't ask for it lol
I get their usability too. It's understandable if you have to access a server remotely and you want some sort of interface for some software without loading the server with a lot of packages like gtk, qt or stuff like that. I said it mostly to jokingly dunk on the newer arch/omarchy users with their fancy hyperland setups :P
Your torrent box should not need a WM to download torrents, and given the dynamic nature of a torrent download (speed/peers/pieces), a one-shot cli wont cut it either.
A TUI is a perfect use-case for torrents, though I havent seen it done well in either transmission or aria2
You're totally right, that's the best usecase for a TUI. I was joking :)
me too, but only if it's a good gui...
I like GUIs but I also like automation. Give me a nice simple GUI but also give me a way to run from a bash shell so I can automate functions based on complex conditions and/or a schedule.
TUI
You're just describing a task scheduler.
GUIs are nice. we are made for visual perception. don't feel bad about it.
often, when one sees things presented visually, such as all the files in a directory, it makes much more sense much faster than if one has to read the filenames on a console.
GUIs are actually superior for human-friendlyness in many cases, but their functionality is limited and also they can't be scripted. also it's much faster to write a CLI program than a GUI program (at least for me).
The thing about CLI is that everything is hidden by default. You come to the application with your own mindset and a goal in mind and you figure out how make it do what you want.
When there's a GUI, you often see everything that's possible from the start and so the application dictates how you use it.
Though, you can do either with CLI and GUI as well. That's the sweet spot I think is the best. I love it when a CLI app guides the user through a process and gives options. And a good GUI should disable OK buttons and show validation errors if not everything is entered correctly.
In a perfect world, every app has a CLI mode, interactive and non interactive and a GUI mode with full validation and responsive UI changes. But realistically, good UX is what we need, either GUI or CLI.
Also CLI interfaces are a lot like having to know a language with the right keywords and vocabulary. Sometimes the manual doesn't always list out all the commands so it takes some trial and error to figure out. You can easily change something you didn't want to as you do.
This is one of the reasons why I can't migrate from visual studio to VS code for work. Everything is hidden beyond the weird palette search bar thingy. Just give me drop down menus and toolbars please. I'm stuck of having to remember shortcuts for things I don't do often enough to warrant it taking space up in my very limited pool of memory
Heh same here. I'm missing so many toolbars I regularly use in VS. I do use VScode at home but I'm always at a loss on how to do something.
Being using computers since 1992. I learned with DOS and SCO Unix.
I prefer GUIs, thank you very much.
Even when the only available option for me was Windows 3.1, I still preferred it over the CMD.
I like both, but I think I would like cli better if the syntax were more expressive, and more akin to natural human language.
I can appreciate the desire for "you know what I meant" CLI interaction, but shudder at the verbosity of natural language in a lot of these cases.
I think there has to be a happy medium, but I guess it depends on personal preference. It's not like brevity can't be achieved through things like aliases anyway. I just want text-based computer stuff to look a little more like something Inform 7.
The hardware of a computer is not designed to handle natural language parsing. Techbros with just enough knowledge to be dangerous will say it's a matter of complex-enough software, but it's more that human brains are not Von Neumann machines
Friend, I have studied my fair share of programming, I get it. I'm not saying there should be any significant difference to the way information is processed, or what kind of processing occurs. Just that the syntax itself trades off a little of it's brevity for a little more readability, like something along the lines of the Inform 7 but still within the boundaries of how the programs and cli normally operate under the hood.
Oh, for sure. All it takes is me looking at an Awk one-liner to make my headspin. Give me a simple "for each line in $FILE, reformat MM/dd/yyyy as dd/MM/yyyy" instead of... whatever that looks like in Awk.
I like both the CLI and a nice GUI. Both serve a purpose for me. For example, Dolphin is quite a good GUI for going through directories and doing some file-management. Quick, easy and clear. But when I need to copy files and do some wrangling, I like the CLI.
Why not both? ROX Filer allows me to select a number of files and then apply a terminal command to all of them. I think that's really neat.
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