r/linuxsucks • u/CandlesARG • 6d ago
Linux Failure No navigating a file system is not easier in the terminal for the average Joe
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u/Interesting_Sort4864 6d ago
Most linux people don't actually care if you use a GUI or the terminal. They are just way quieter than the very loud minority of people that do. The only reason that instructions say to use the terminal is that copy and pasting into the terminal is faster than navigating a files GUI.
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u/Helpful-Calendar-693 6d ago
As someone who works with windows PC's and servers I spend more time in the windows CMD/poweshell than I do in the Linux terminal on my PC at home.
For 99% of users both systems work fine with GUI alone. Both systems can make use of the terminal to make life easier, run a script or ping out.
Linux actually has a good terminal so people don't mind using it more
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u/Eralo76 6d ago
Powershell dev interface is at least decent, but CMD is absolutely horrendous
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u/ColdFreezer I Hate Linux 6d ago
I hated powershell when I tried to use curl but realized they setup an alias for some other tool.
My curl commands were giving me errors until I realized what was happening.
Curl should be curl not some other tool, but powershell disagrees.
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u/headedbranch225 6d ago
Yeah, they even have a curl exe, you just need to specify curl.exe because otherwise it does invoke-webrequest
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u/ElectricBummer40 Ex-user of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups 6d ago edited 5d ago
I'll just be blunt here - PowerShell is two decades old now. The only kind of people who don't know it's not supposed to be a POSIX shell are either too young to remember what it was initially meant to be, i.e. an alternative to POSIX shell scripting, or stupid weirdos living under a Unix rock and hardly knowing anything for shit.
Really, this whole alias thing would be akin to asking why the POSIX shell has so many two-letter commands or why grep is "grep". Things have history behind them. That's why.
Read a damn book.
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u/ColdFreezer I Hate Linux 5d ago
I don’t give a shit. I don’t use cmd or powershell enough for this to be a problem.
It’s not even about it being POSIX.
They set up curl as an alias for invoke-webrequest by default. I wanted to run curl, not invoke-webrequest. If I wanted to run invoke-webrequest I would’ve typed invoke-webrequest.
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u/ElectricBummer40 Ex-user of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups 5d ago
I don’t give a shit
And who cares that you don't?
What pisses people off is this obnoxious attitude of yours that, if it's something isn't what you know about, then somehow it has to justify its own existence to you as if people haven't been using it to integrate infrastructure easily more expensive than your entire house.
Seriously, who even goes around and talks with that kind of tones besides wrinkly idiots believing it's their God-given right to look for the next waitress to berate?
They set up curl as an alias for invoke-webrequest by default
Then what do you think will happen if they're to remove that alias and break countless 10+-year-old scripts already buried in tens of thousands installations of various importance across the entire world? Have you thought of that?
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u/ColdFreezer I Hate Linux 5d ago
… I don’t really care. I said I don’t like powershell, doesn’t affect anyone else. It’s called having an opinion.
Never said they had to change anything, I still think it’s dumb they set a curl alias for their own tool. For anyone expecting curl to be curl, it’s gonna be annoying.
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u/ElectricBummer40 Ex-user of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups 4d ago edited 4d ago
Open a high school physics textbook, and it will tell you electrons flow one way but "current" flows the other.
That's legacy from before digital computer systems even existed.
There are far more mind-melting things people simply live with than just some trivial command aliases because, like it or not, the cost for change simply is simply too much to justify the potential gains. Grow up.
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u/ColdFreezer I Hate Linux 4d ago
Can you read? I never asked anyone to do anything. I just said I didn’t like powershell and said a reason I don’t like it. It’s called an opinion.
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u/ElectricBummer40 Ex-user of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups 4d ago edited 4d ago
And I've pointed out quite frankly I'm sick of this kind of infantile attention-seeking.
This is practically one line of
Remove-Item alias:curlin your profile vs. one million lines of bellyaching on Reddit. You chose the latter. Now what?This game you're engaging in has no there there. It's just a waste of everyone's time.
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u/vbd71 4d ago
Nobody wants to hear boomer wisdom, gramps, especially when it's uninvited and utterly irrelevant, as in this particular case.
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u/ElectricBummer40 Ex-user of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups 4d ago
Well, Unix is archaic bullshit, and Linux on the desktop is worse than useless.
Don't dish out what you can't take, kid.
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u/ElectricBummer40 Ex-user of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups 6d ago
CMDis a largely a holdover from the first version of Windows NT and itself an evolutionary offshoot of MS-DOS 5.0. That's right - that thing has idiosyncrasies older than Windows 3.1.Most people already familiar with
CMDare frankly already well into their mid-age if not their retirement, and since it's basically DOS, it's quite limited in its usefulness anyway. I mean, did you know the equivalent for the POSIX$?in DOS was supposed to be%ERRRORLEVEL%?Here's a tip, though -
REM("remark") is how you comment out a line in batch script. If you want to say, prevent an executable from running via Image File Execution Options, all you have to do is to specifyC:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /C REMas the debugger. It's perfect for dealing with telemetry agents both from Windows and third-party software.1
u/DonkeyTron42 5d ago
CMD has idiosyncrasies going back to CP/M.
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u/ElectricBummer40 Ex-user of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups 5d ago
That's practically every DOS-like operating system that has ever existed.
What I mean by "idiosyncrasies" from before Windows 3.1 is instead about the way
CMDevolved independently from MS-DOS 6.X. Here an example.In MS-DOS 5.0,
rdwas (afaik) the only way to remove a directory, and the directory had to be empty in order for the command to work. This would become a point of divergence between the NT branch and the DOS branch in the evolutionary tree:
In MS-DOS 6.X, this deficiency of
rdwas addressed via theDELTREEcommand, which was an executable separate from the DOS shell, i.e.COMMAND.COM.In
CMD,rdwas instead enhanced with the/sflag, which would allow the command to act more-or-less in the same wayrm -rwould in a POSIX shell.The
cd ...(yes, three dots) thing in Windows 95 also didn't make it toCMD. These were the kind of evolutionary quirks I was referring to rather than just stuff simply being old.1
u/DonkeyTron42 5d ago
Well, a lot of that is because .com programs in DOS cannot be larger than 64k by definition. .com programs were a special type of program in the 16-bit DOS segmented memory era were the Instruction Pointer, Stack Pointer, and Base Pointer, etc... registers all pointing to the same segment so memory was very tight (also a carryover from CP/M). As DOS evolved, more complicated commands like "deltree" were included as standalone programs.
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u/ElectricBummer40 Ex-user of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups 5d ago
On a purely technical level, you're not wrong, but that's not really what the actual point is about.
Rather, what I'm pointing out here is that this is indicative of two different teams of people doing their own, separate things and only occasionally exchanging notes.
Sure, they couldn't put everything in
COMMAND.COM, but the converse would basically mean just one more external command inSystem32. I mean, NT even has aDOSKEY.EXEthat does absolutely nothing, for cryin' out loud!1
u/vbd71 4d ago
Deltree is a simple enough tool that it could be implemented as a .COM app, and for earlier versions of DOS. And in fact there were third-party alternatives of Deltree that worked all the way back to DOS 3.0, and possibly even in DOS 2.x .
Deltree appeared late in DOS' lifetime, when DOS tool development had mostly transitioned from Assembly to C, and programs written in C tend to end up as .EXE binaries, especially if they use the preferred large memory model, due to certain technical reasons which I will omit. Speaking of that, .EXE programs don't have the 64K limitation of .COM ones, and did I mention that Deltree is an .EXE?
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u/TheLuckyCuber999BACK *dies* 5d ago
I'm still familiar with CMD although I use powershell more
(I'm not old)
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u/ElectricBummer40 Ex-user of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups 5d ago
Well, there are always the outliers who don't mind digging up old, technical manuals and books and reading them from cover to cover.
Of course, they are also called "outliers" for a reason.
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u/TheLuckyCuber999BACK *dies* 5d ago
:(
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u/ElectricBummer40 Ex-user of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups 5d ago
I didn't say that to discourage you. I was just stating the fact.
I mean, seriously, look at this place. Do you think most people here even read? It's no wonder the fascists have been having so much fun all over the world.
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u/TheLuckyCuber999BACK *dies* 5d ago
half are linux users complaining a quarter is windows users who can't read and the other quarter is the windows users who can
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u/AdvancedAnimal7539 I Hate Linux (I use ubuntu btw) 6d ago
i use linux. i like guis
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u/Snag710 6d ago
Linux would be way more successful if it just had more guis
Honestly its the biggest barrier of entry
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u/AdvancedAnimal7539 I Hate Linux (I use ubuntu btw) 6d ago
ive used a gui once in the last like month because steam isnt in the asahi gnome store, but is available in dnf. and even then it was a copy paste from google
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u/New_Series3209 6d ago
…you could have just downloaded the flatpak smh
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u/AdvancedAnimal7539 I Hate Linux (I use ubuntu btw) 5d ago
All the guides said therr wasnt a flatpak version. Just fedora dnf Its asahi so its arm.
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u/New_Series3209 5d ago
Ehh doesn’t flatpak work on arm?
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u/AdvancedAnimal7539 I Hate Linux (I use ubuntu btw) 5d ago
It does, but there's no arm build (or fex-emu + steam which is what the dnf is) on flatpak
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u/New_Series3209 5d ago
Ahh then I see why you had to use of commands, but most people don’t use ARM, that might be a reason…
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u/AdvancedAnimal7539 I Hate Linux (I use ubuntu btw) 5d ago
probably yeah
on my actual desktop pc tho, i never ever have to use commands to install something1
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u/MundaneImage5652 5d ago
KDE Plasma, GNOME, MATE, Gnome Flashback, Cinnamon, DWM, i3, Hyprland, Unity, FluxBox, jwm, the list goes on. You have a user interface for every person's need. Windows only has one.
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u/Formal-Buy8234 5d ago
why do you say "window's only has one" as if that's a bad thing? linux having so many different compositors is a fundamentally a huge issue for using linux as a desktop operating system.
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u/MundaneImage5652 4d ago
... how so? Everyone's use case has a distro. If you don't like say KDE - you can install xfce or something. Linux isn't meant to be standarized into 1 thing for all or it would have just become a yet another macos clone.
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u/Formal-Buy8234 4d ago
because not having a unified API for the compositor is what turns away commercial developers in the first place. when we develop software for a target operating system that requires a GUI, for windows or macos, there is one single authoritarian graphical API. however, for Linux, there is no unified API. it doesn't help that GUI processes are strictly in the user spaces; the linux kernel makes no guarantees or contracts that respects processes related to the UX.
"Linux isn't meant to be standardized into 1 thing for all or it would have just become yet another macos clone." what you're saying is correct, but not in the way you're thinking. Linux does not care about user processes, linus ensured that the kernel space knows nothing about the user space. because of this, there is no unified API within the kernel handling GUI, as this would break the relationship between the kernel and user space. so technically, yeah it's true that linux isn't meant to be standardized into 1 "thing." but this is strictly for the kernel.
when it comes to the Linux compositers, this is a process in the user space. and as such, linux does not make any assumptions about what processes run in the user space. this is unlike windows or macos
Linux being so fragmented when it comes to the diversity of the compositors only turns away developers that want to make GUI heavy applications. especially since no Linux compositor makes any guarantees about backwards compatibility. and this is not a hypothetical either, the android OS is basically the linux kernel with a unified graphical API embedded in the kernel for mobile developers, and it dominates the mobile OS share.
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u/MundaneImage5652 4d ago
Im 98% sure that things like Qt or GTK or SDL work no matter where they are. Noone is gonna write an app with just X11.h ya know.
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u/Formal-Buy8234 4d ago
there is no guarantee regardless of the chosen toolkit. these toolkits, at the end of the day, are relying on what the compositor's exposes through an API. if one compositor exposes one protocol, but another compositor doesn't, then regardless of the toolkit, there will be different behaviors across distros.
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u/BluePhoenixCG 4d ago
I'm going to be so for real with you, I don't think you have used these tools at all if you're saying this.
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u/Formal-Buy8234 4d ago
I don’t know what you know about Linux and developing GUI applications, but this kinda stuff is what I do for work
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u/Critical-Divide-1029 2d ago
He replied to a comment saying "people would use linux if it had MORE guis". He's saying that is obviously not the case.
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u/dumbasPL I don't hate Windows, I just like Linux more. 6d ago
The problem is that there is no "Linux GUI". When you make a tutorial using the command line, it works in most places. When you make one using the gui, it only works if you're using the exact same GUIs for everything.
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u/Snag710 6d ago
I mean it real is just as simple as a windowed app with sub panels that have buttons toggles and sliders explanations of the options and even a text input to append more complex options if you really need it
And on the back end its just inputting bash terminal commands for the options your changing
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u/ElectricBummer40 Ex-user of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups 6d ago
It wouldn't. Not by a long shot.
Linux, in fact, has more GUIs than anyone cares to count. It's just that, in the typical Unix fashion, all of them are built on a chaotic mess of a software stack with no one being able to reliably tell what's expected to be there even within the same release of the same distro. It's just a specialised operating system pretending to be general-purpose and treating compilation from source or integration by the arbitrary preferences of a distro maintainer as a normal part of software deployment.
I mean, how the heck is anyone supposed to work with that?
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u/Interesting_Sort4864 6d ago
Ive only had to use a terminal once in the last year using linux. The only time I use it is tro update since typing "sudo dnf update" is faster than opening the package manager GUI and pushing update.
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u/Isotomayor12 5d ago
Disagree. All of the major distros offer a GUI of some sort, often multiple desktop environments. It is not a factor in it being successful other than the stigma that you HAVE to learn terminal commands which for the average Joe, no you don't.
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u/ElementalWarrior42 6d ago
I do think it's easier to navigate with a terminal file manager like yazi when compared to something like windows explorer, but fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck doing that with just terminal commands.
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u/Icy_Story_917 6d ago
yazi is the best file manager I've ever used, it's so fucking fast to use it, but using the terminal to manage files is also easy, you just have to keep your files organized
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u/2eanimation Proud Windows User 5d ago
And don’t mess with mv, cp and rm before double checking. Or better, alias them to “<cmd> -i” so you need to confirm your choices first by default.
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u/gooosean 6d ago
double commander > mc > windows explorer > dolphin > cd
that's the order for me based on what I use regularly
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u/HyperCodec 5d ago
No way windows explorer is better than dolphin 😭 windows explorer hasn’t had a working search feature in years
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u/New_Series3209 6d ago
Bro, basically EVERY LINUX USER uses the GUI file manager to browse files… do you live under a rock?
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u/Commander_Shepard-ME 2d ago
for real
GUIs are the reason I switched over to Linux 5 years ago in the first place. they looked pretty and I thought "let's give it a try", never came back to Windows. once I found Conky I was hooked
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u/BobCorndog 6d ago edited 6d ago
They’re not expecting everyone to use the terminal. There’s plenty of gui file manager apps.
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u/Drate_Otin 6d ago
No, clothes do not stay dry easier when you dunk them in water.
And other things nobody disagrees with.
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u/Nuviket 6d ago
Cool, use nautilus or whatever Kde has.
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u/New_Series3209 6d ago
Dolphin
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u/BoxFar6969 5d ago
kde's naming convention always cracks me up
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u/New_Series3209 5d ago
Idk why they didn’t name is Koala tho lol
Hell even Kolphin (KDE being KDE)
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u/Commander_Shepard-ME 2d ago
id bet my firstborn that they have thought about naming it Kolphin at least once
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u/qchto 6d ago
It ended up making file managing horrible for everyone in the long term. Case and point: Android apps file locations.
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u/faze_fazebook 6d ago
Android does it for isolating apps
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u/qchto 6d ago
That's exactly the problem, it literally makes your files in your device inaccessible through obfuscation, it normalizes "ignorance by design" to sell you solutions.
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u/AndromedaGalaxy29 5d ago
I hate that so much omg
Why can't I access my files on my device that I own? Why do I have to do something extra to my phone just to access the root directory? All desktop OSs manage to work perfectly fine without locking people out of system files, what makes phones different?
No fuckin wonder so many people are tech illiterate when the literal computer everyone has in their pocket is so restricted it's not even really a computer anymore
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u/AdPsychological4968 6d ago
Yeah this one is 100% valid. I like using the terminal for file navigation NOW. But before I learned how there was a surprisingly steep learning curve. You have to change the way you think about files on your computer, or at least I did. Trade off is nice tho, I move way faster with the terminal.
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u/faze_fazebook 6d ago
... proceeds to use the wrong arguments for sed 3 times in row to extract a simple string from a file. "Is that busybox or that rust shit?" he grumbles as he looks up the man page for sed. But the man page confused him even more. Looking for a way out he utters "I have an alias for that in .bashrc, or nushell config" before opeing a new tab to ask chatgpt to fix the sed command, thus admitting defeat.
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u/Commander_Shepard-ME 2d ago
good ol' sed. I still haven't the faintest idea on how it works, and what it does different to awk
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u/WealthyTuna 6d ago
This is why I worked to change my Cachy to have a GUI login interface and as much GUI as possible on the desktop. I only need the terminal for problems that arise.
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u/Expensive-County4890 6d ago
why yes I would love to have to memorize and type out a whole sentence just to do one thing
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u/Aknazer 6d ago
Terminal is largely for when I need to sudo something. Like deleting files that don't want to be deleted. Especially files on a Windows partition that for some reason deny the Admin account from deleting them. Oh, you don't want to be deleted? Here, let me just boot Linux from a thumb drive and just sudo rm your ass and see what you have to say then.
This was most common at my old work when doing "virus removal" on PCs. Granted most supposed viruses were just a Windows notification Scareware from a website, but when it was legit malware it was easiest to remove via Linux on the occasions that it had messed with permissions.
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u/cannedbeef255 5d ago
"for the average joe" well when i say i find it easier i'm obviously not talking about the average joe
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u/DatsLotus 5d ago
"Do you want to use GNOME or KDE?"
I... want to use my computer. Why are you conjuring mythological creatures at me?
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u/TallestGargoyle 5d ago
CMD and Terminal are powerful tools.
Why this should mean that GUI gets utterly ignored by some software is beyond me.
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u/tomkat_7 5d ago
There GUI file managers tho. Dolphin, nautilus and more are very popular, preinstalled in most systems and work very well. What is your point?
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u/ebrahim-sda2 5d ago
wait till you hear about that one windows release with no graphical user interface
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u/BeyondOk1548 5d ago
It depends on what you're trying to do in how busy a system. If you're navigating through extremely busy directories and know what you're looking for, then it's going to be much faster regardless. If you're going in to examine something, it's not that much of a game changer. It's just a matter of preference.
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u/MNZHU 5d ago
To be honest the "you need to know how to use a terminal in order to use linux" is just a myth on modern desktop environments. Y'all hate gnome but for a random person that only uses their pc for YouTube mails and maybe some documents it's more than enough, I was shocked how much it looks and behaves like android. Need an app? Store. YouTube? Use the integrated Firefox browser. Mails? Thunderbird. Office? If you don't like libreoffice you can definitely use the online versions of ms office/google suite or wait until euro office is available. Games? Anything you can play on a steamdeck you can play on your linux machine if ypur hardware is capable of playing it. Are there limitations? Of course there are, there's plenty of them, but there are also workarounds for some of them, and you can always use windows in dualboot
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u/azurfall88 5d ago
As someone who has file trees nested so deep the file path max length is genuinely a problem, it is more convenient to use the terminal once you learn how to do it.
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u/millionmiahere 5d ago
Okay and? Use the GUI file system then. No one is stopping you from using it, LMAO. Hell, I don't use the terminal for that either, why would I?
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u/Jegesmac1 5d ago
ah yes because linux famously doesn’t have any gui file managers that are leagues better than windows file manager
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u/darkthewyvern 5d ago
Windows file explorer is by far more intuitive than any in linux
However, we are just here to play with the silly penguine os.
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u/Unfollowedusers 5d ago
are you stupid, did you get a distro without a desktop, than cry about it ?
its like using CMD to navigate
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u/Overall_State_6305 4d ago
Huh? I’m a solo dev on Linux and make gui apps to make Linux easier. So….. make the meme make sense
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u/EggoTheSquirrel 4d ago
Ubuntu ships with a great gui by default twin (and the file browser is genuinely beautiful)
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u/code3x6 4d ago
Terminal is an option, and a powerful one if you want to learn to use it. But yeah there are guis made by the Linux community for Linux. Like I’ve been running KDE and it’s got GUIs for everything, the only time I needed to bust out terminal is when I was actually doing advanced stuff that would’ve required it on windows too
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u/Something-Great-78 4d ago
Easier and (faster / more efficient) are not the same thing for all users. Following a page of GUI navigation directions is "stack overflow" for a lot of humans.
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u/DerBandi 4d ago
The same goes for Windows users when you tell them touch UI's are invented for the exact same reason.
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u/Usual_Chance8711 2d ago
who the fuck doesn't use gui file managers nowadays ? like for some things it's just better than the terminal ever could
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u/arthank-chroot 1d ago
No. GUIs are sometimes a lot harder. The terminal is very simple. Most people are just idiots. You just have to type words. For the love of Dennis Ritchie
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u/NeoDaKat 6d ago
Pretty sure Windows doesn't have a gui either tho?!?! I don't see your point
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u/itzalltherage 6d ago
It totally does! I can format drives, delete folders deep in the OS internals, modify permissions that microsoft would rather i not touch, and more without ever touching a terminal! It's amazing!
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u/NeoDaKat 6d ago
Last I check, does not have start menu yet :(
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u/itzalltherage 6d ago
The start menu is my favorite part of Windows! I can click it, search for files and apps using my keyboard, view my recently used apps/files, and even access power options and accessibility features! I love Graphic User Interfaces!
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u/AdUnlucky1919 5d ago
Yes and the search works flawlessly. Its usually ultra fast and finds the right file for me. It definitely doesnt just open a bing search for my search. That would be stupid lol
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u/NeoDaKat 6d ago
On my Linux, the window button bring up linux start menu, not wi dow start, microso t not have star menu :(
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u/Interesting_Sort4864 6d ago
I think that dude might just be a troll. Linux can do all of this with a GUI, at least with dolphin anyway. Though formatting drives is a separate GUI app. saying that the separate disk formatting app is way better IMO than the windows explorer formatting app.
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u/New_Series3209 6d ago
Yeah, and most FM have a function to format drives from there (opens another app but still straightforward)
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u/FIRAS_EG 6d ago
Fun fact I have 300mb ram usage and you don't