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Can You Use Linux Without the Terminal? (How to Geek article)
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this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
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Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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If you want to use Linux without the terminal nowadays it's pretty easy. But also I think the fear of the terminal is part of the culture that consumer electronics have cultivated where people don't know (or want to know) how their systems work.
If you take the time to use it, not only can you save yourself time, but also learn a lot more about how you can fix things when they go wrong! That kind of knowledge gives you so much more ownership of your system, because you don't have to rely on your manufacturer to solve problems for you.
Same for Mac and Windows too, the terminal is something that shouldn't be necessary, but when it is it helps to know what you're doing. :)
I think not everyone needs to know how their device works. Specialization is what advances us as humans after all. If they wanted to know, good for them, and if they don't also good for them. If I were using a car, I don't need to know how the engine convert a chemical energy, transfer power, and generate thrust
Edit just to give an example, an office worker may only need to use a word processor and their OS be up to date. If the user can just click the GUI to update the OS rather than typing the command for whatever package manager the OS uses, it is good enough for him. Sysadmin can give them the instruction once and done.
If the user forgot the instruction, they can explore it on their own with GUI without internet since no matter how deep a GUI config is, then there must be a way to get there (assuming the UI designer isn't shit). Contrast that with CLI where if you forgot or don't know any command there is little help or indicator of what's available and what can be done without external help.
I could not agree more. The number of people in here who are demanding that everyone who uses an OS understand it completely is absolutely ridiculous. I’d love to sit down and watch these people rebuild a lawnmower engine or service the compressor on their refrigerator. Hell, a shocking number of people I meet don’t know how to cook for themselves and they’re going to demand that end users be able to chroot and save a nonbootable system? Get out of here.
It's pretty unreasonable to expect people to know all the intricacies of their OS unless it's their job, but I do think people could stand to treat their computer less like an unknowable magic box when they need to work with it and take a few minutes to try any basic troubleshooting at all. An example of the sort of thing I'm talking about, last year, my fan stopped working nearly as well and began making crazy amounts of noise. Could I explain to you how the motor in my fan works? Absolutely not. But I unplugged it, looked up how to disassemble it and got out my screwdrivers and opened it up to see if there was anything that I could see wrong with it. Turns out there was a lot of hair wrapped around a shaft and the base of the blades that built up over the years I've had it, and removing that and reassembling it was all it took to get it working fine again.
Plenty of people don't want to put in even that small amount of time and effort to understand things when it comes to computers, which is also a valid choice of its own, but they tend to annoy me when they attribute being unable to do something to the system being too complicated to understand/use, rather than owning their decision to focus their time and energy elsewhere. There are absolutely complex programs that are not accessible for non-tech people on Linux or the BSDs, but the same could be said for Windows and Mac. In the case of the other two, people just choose the option that works for them, but with Linux, they decide ahead of time that Linux is tough and complicated and don't even try. It could be something as simple as they want to install Debian and need non-free firmware to use their wireless card, there are people who will declare this to complicated to understand and discard the idea of using an OS entirely over a question that can be resolved in less than 5 minutes with a quick search and nano, all because "Oh, I'm not a computer person, it says terminal."
Yeah, you do make a good point about misattributing the system being incapable to their lack of research. But people don't like it when they are wrong/corrected most of the time. It also applies everywhere, computers just so happen to be the most prominent. The point is that people will complain about anything anywhere.
You bring up an example of installing Debian and needing non-free firmware for their wireless card. Take a step back and think how many people are even aware about the term non-free? It is quite a ubiquitous english word with different meanings in the open source community. People reading it will assume they know what it means.
The scenario when someone that is fed up with windows and decides to install debian will see the word "non-free" and attribute it to "you must pay" at glance. If the resource they used to install it mentions and clarify what non-free means, good. Otherwise, it can be a boogeyman for them and make them re-think their decision to switch.
Ikr? "Since it interest me, it you interest you too"
manwould like to have words with your strawman.And how does the user suppose to know to type
man? He may remember the instructions to check man, but he may not. For us, those 3 letter words are very familiar, but others need time to remember them. On GUI, this is no problem because as I stated they will bound to find it by exploring. Basically point and click adventure games I guess rather than the guessing game. And users will choose the path they most familiar first.Bigger problem, even if they know about MAN pages, remembering what their looking for is hard. You can't type 'man dnf' if you don't remember what your package manager is called.
I wonder how feasible searching MAN pages is.
Yeah good point. Navigation can be unintuitive too. Like, how do you quit? Is it q? Ctrl+C? What even is the weird symbol before C? Those are some of the hurdles that must be overcome when coming to CLI and not necessarily easy to remember. Sure you can do it in 1 hour, but say tomorrow would you remember it again? What if the system is running smoothly for 1 month and you never opened the terminal again after those 1 hour?
You don't need man, just type the command with no arguments and you'll get the help message.
Alright, try it with
catThere is a large degree of willful ignorance. Its 2024 and the degree of computer illiteracy is astounding.
I was an 80s kid but even I grew up with computers: Atari, Commodore and Amstrad. I then learnt PCs with DOS. All pretty much self learnt from 8 years old as no one else in my family knew shit about computers so I was on my own.
These days computers are so user friendly ad practically run themselves, even Linux but the amount of people who cant perform basic computer tasks even in Windows is unbelievable. Do they even still teach computers at schools anymore?
That's because in the 80's you had to know computers to use them, and most people never touched them. Only geeks like you and me.
Now everyone uses a computer (at least the screen-only computer in their pocket) without knowing anything about it.
It doesn't mean there are less people who really know how computers work. Just that now even clueless people use them.
Do you know how everything in your house works? How to repair everything? No right?
Would you be brave enough to mess with the grounding of your house, or the AC or the heaters, the washing machine, the doors? Not eveyone wants mess with every (subsystem) thing in their house/live"
Most of the people I know want their PC to work and if somwthing goes wrong they just send it to repair or ask somebody else to fix it, they don't wanna do it themselves, which I find normal, they have little to no interesting in PCs, and that is compleatly fine.
And before someone says "Yeah, but the computer won't kill you if you fuck up the fixing or messing, let me tell you, a "sudo rm -r" or "sudo chown -R" can fuck you system BAR, making you loose important data and info.
-...But refugee -I hear you about to type-, they SHOULD have 10921 back-ups in atleast 2542 independent locations. Yo, they don't wanna even see the terminal, and you want them to interest themselves for data integrity and redundacy? Come on.
I didn't say you have to know everything, just like I don't know everything in my house and how it works, but I do know how to do basic repairs so I don't pay loads of money for a guy to come and unclog a drain. I know how to reset my circuit breakers, how to change a fuse, how to change a lightbulb.
That's what the terminal is. No one here is telling you to write a bootloader in assembly or meticulously study kernel environment parameters. No one advocating for basic knowledge of a terminal likely has knowledge on subnet masks, compilers, or other low level systems that a modern Linux abstracts for you.
But! I know how to update my packages from a terminal. I know how to install a package outside of a repository, or one that's not listed on my graphical package manager. I know how to export an environment variable to get my software to work how it should.
That's what "knowing the terminal" gives you. It's a basic skill that unlocks you from being a mere "user" of a system to an owner of a system. I don't think everyone will ever need the terminal, but there are people who are replying to me that seem to have a genuine fear that people have knowledge of their computers in a meaningful way.
Knowledge is autonomy for whatever you do, and there's a reason why the most profitable of systems are the very systems that are locked down abstracted and "user friendly" in all ways that harm a user's rights and freedoms.
I'll coincide with you in that first-aid-quick-repairs is something people should in the best of cases know how to do, but setting a envirental variable or installing a package is not a "simple thing". I've worked with engineers that programmed math models for a living that had no idea what a enviromental varible even was. Yes is easy to do, but the concept behind it, what it is, what it does and why are not simple, without the right background or the will to learn about the topic.
And, about user and owner. Sure, I get your point and personally I share it. But again, that is an opinion, tell a non-interested-user that they don't really own their rig until they know how to use the terminal and I assure you that most of them will disagree.
Edit cause I wrongly posted before finishing: Comparing uncloging -manually pushing and pull a bar- or chaning a light -turn left, change, then right- or a breaker -literally just pulling a tab up- are WAY simpler actions. Yes, running apt upgrade is easy, but how you know is all well? That it work? + if I run apt update everyday I see almost no diference in my system, why should I even do something like that
I think this is the bigger issue, to be honest. Like your example of environmental variables, it's not a complicated concept, but when a guide says to set the variable for Editor rather than a context menu asking you to choose the default program to open this type of file in the future, all of a sudden, people lose their minds about how complicated it is.
These examples don't make sense to me as a point against using the terminal, especially since GUI package managers are a thing these days. Many upgrades are under the hood, so to speak, and don't produce visible changes for most users, and this applies just as much to other operating systems as it does to Linux. When Windows finishes upgrading and reboots, or Chrome tells a user updates are available, and they restart it, how do they know all is good? For the most part, they take it as a given that all is good as long as there's no new, undesired behavior that starts after the upgrade.
Just because I haven't been exploited by a security vulnerability or encountered a particular bug is no reason to remain on a version of my OS or programs that is still liable to either of them. That's just a bizarre argument against staying up to date.
Not to be adversarial, but Yes, I know how everything works in my house and how to fix it, or maintain it. Same as my car, or PC. i just see it as understanding the fundamentals of the world we access.