Help

There is a way to get genuine help from a Linux forum.

Say "Fuck this, I'm going back to Windows".

Don't do anything rash, give me a minute I'm wrapping the command with Tkinter
Two ways, the other is by saying "solved" with a half baked solution that's incorrect.

I guess you could say Linux fanboys' silliness is...

...terminal.

dad jokes this early in the morning (in the east part of the world)

I swear it feels like for a lot of the things I do on Linux there's a GUI app for it, but then if I wanna do something as basic as adjust my fan speed I gotta use the freaking terminal.

Like it's always at the worst possible time.

Edit: I’ve installed a distro on my gaming PC that I really liked, used it on my laptop. Sensors and fans were fully supported. Did not work at all on my PC so I told it to fuck off. It’s just too much of a pain to set up.

I prefer using my scripts, but I understand everyone isn’t insane.
https://flathub.org/apps/org.coolero.Coolero
- I’ve noticed over the years a LOT of Linux users do no have their system sensors / CPUs setup properly. Mostly missing fan information, missing / incorrect sensors and most importantly improper AMD CPU PSTATE and governors. For example, the past few years I’ve had to ensure I had correct kernel drivers and boot kernels parameters for my AMD 5950x to properly use the correct governor and idle at 500mhz and for correct sensor information and control for my viii dark hero MB.
There's coreCTRL for AMD and apparently nvidia-setting for Nvidia?
AMD GPUs got more tools due to them being open source, while Nvidia's isn't and you are beholden to Nvidia bothering to implement support, which they often don't.
Also, idk if I would call fan curves that basic, haha. For the vast majority the default curve is sufficient.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic or serious. I've been using computers for decades and not once adjusted fan speeds, so that function doesn't seem very basic to me.
- When building a system yourself, setting up a custom curve is how you get the best balance between cooling and noise.
  I try to choose motherboards that support doing that in the bios, so I never have to worry about it on the OS level.
I think it's a matter of habit, really. After using a somewhat minimal Arch install with a WM instead of DE, I get frustrated when an app doesn't have a CLI version, using GUI now feels less comfy almost
This is part of the reason I haven't gone back to Linux for my gaming PC. I had zero desire to try to set a fan curve in the terminal.
- And honestly with a pretty UI setting the fan curve is so satisfying.
I feel that in my bones.
If I need to do something obscure, like organize your Magic: The Gathering card collection by artist, there's a GUI on Linux for that.
But if I want to adjust my monitor, I better break out the CLI!
I like cooler control. I hate appimage but I'm on arch so it's just a quick dive into the murky deep called the AUR.

Who need GUI apps when you can do these things on CLI:

view image: imcat my-image.png
watch video, even YouTube: mpv --vo=tct "https://youtube.com/watch?v=BBJa32lCaaY"
browse the web using modern Firefox engine: browsh
listen to your Spotify playlists: spt play --name "Your Playlist" --playlist --random

and perhaps many more I'm not currently aware of...

While this is not a serious post I'm going to take it seriously, so here are some of the reasons:
Nobody can easily remember the precise file name and if you don't get the first letters right you're screwed(did I mention capital letters matter?)
Wtf is --vo=tct? No sane person is remembering all of that (same goes for the rest 10000 parameters and options)
Again, waaayyy too many parameters, who remembers their playlist name? There is no autocomplete here, you're on your sad own in your sad little room with your sad little feelings, because there's no one there to tell you the song's precise name, because computers are assholes and don't hate you.
So why GUIs? Because they make computers seem like friendly fellas which actually care about you and give you options, tell you the available functions(without deciphering a 50 pages manual if done well)
- If you take it seriously, then at least your complaints should be reasonable, not meme-worthy.
  Autocomplete is a standard feature in CLI nowadays, so no need to remember everything.
  And parameters usually have names chosen to make the most sense and to be memorable (e.g. vo = video output).
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=BBJa32lCaaY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Imcat is awesome, Debian and had a news reader with the same name.
MPV refuses to play any YouTube for me I suspect it has something to do with their new restrictions on YouTube DL.
Browsh looks absolutely magnificent until I actually try to use it, It seems like submitting form pages or maybe JavaScript is broken
- You' can try installing yt-dlp. That one is still actively maintained. YouTube also actively trying to broke it, so the one available in debian repo might be out of date.
I do all my photo editing on the command line.
_{(kidding, of course)}
There's also Gomucks, which is a matrix client. Matrix being to discord what lemmy is to reddit

And remember kids, if it is a command, you can automate it and never do it again.

Exactly! Takes so much of the pain away. And you know what would be really useful? If those scripts were accessible easily through simple buttons or sliders on which you could click, or something like along those lines.
- For basic functionality I agree, but I don't think any dev would put the time and effort to implement buttons (much less pipe into another totally different software) for my extremely specific use cases. In the command line I'm presented with a toolset where I can do so myself.

IMO it's not even a Windows vs GNU/Linux debate (although yeah, maybe more of the users of the latter would be familiar with the CLI), it's about using the right tool for the job. Image or video editing? Good luck even starting to do anything without a mouse. Installing something? Yup, even on Windows I'd prefer doing scoop install foobar2000 instead of opening a store app or a website.

I used to use Chocolatey on Windows and briefly tried scoop but now I prefer winget. I dunno, it feels... More official? :)
- I made the mistake of installing powershell using the Microsoft store. Now Winget refuses to update it. I have to open the store to do it.
- My biggest gripe with Winget is it's not available on windows server yet.
You're right. I can't imagine using windows without scoop or chocolatey.

I use CLI daily for git and nano, but it's far from necessary for the average user. I'm not sure why some people want to propagate the idea that Linux is hard when it's just a little different than what most people are used to.

This seems like something a Linux elitist would say

tErMinAL iS mUCh MorE fRieNdLY. gUi is DuMB
- My brother used to constantly try to tell me this. I don't know how many times I had to compare number of keystrokes to number of clicks before he finally admitted GUI programs are easier even if you already know exactly what you're doing.
- This, but written in normal case.
- My rist hurts after 1 week on Windows.

Terminal is great until you paste a command from an online tutorial and it doesn't do what it is suppose to.

Do su rm -rf / to fix all issues you have
- Just for those who are not aware don't do this. This is equivalent to deleting system32.
- laughs in unmutable distro
- Is this some kind of pleb joke I'm too zfs to understand?
So...always?
They're aren't meant to work. They're meant to make us feel pride and accomplishment.
Here's a novel idea, read what you're about to paste and try to understand what it does at least on high level. You can man each command to check what it does and whether the parameters provided make sense.
I wrecked my kernel and rendered wifi unusable doing this just last week!
- Hah! I can do all that without an online tutorial!

Hey, stop bashing linux:)

If there is a well written manual or a wiki im fine with using terminal programs.

But ofc, there's always no documentation available other than a man page.
- There is also that obscure forum post from 2012 that refers to a post from 2004, from someone who gives some cryptic advise with commands not even in the manual that are outdated from 5 major releases ago but somehow still work. Except for one command tgat you then google and find a forum post from 2016 that it has been renamed, but the functionality stayed the same.
  Anyways you put it all together and your problem somehow got solved, but you seemed to have created a black magic incantation because now a three headed demon has appeared and eaten your neighbour alive.
- If you have a problem with man pages, you have a bigger problem.
- A manpage is usually perfectly good with how descriptive they are. Not a problem unless you're really short on time

If you're bored, you can visualize a rotating GUI in your mind. It's free and nobody can stop you.

At the current time this seems kind of untrue. There are many GUI Applications in the repos, which provide alternatives or are wrappers for existing CLI applications. - Perfect for people who dont yet feel comfortable working with programms purely in a terminal.

I agree it's getting better, but some odd stuff does not exist yet. Like changing swap file size. Still need to use good old DD for that
- changing swap file size
  Not sure if i undestand correctly what you mean with that, but there is for example gparted for partition managment

I think the only reason Windows users are afraid of terminals is that they're not used to them. They're not that bad. Most terminal programs have a -(-)help command that shows you what you can do as well, in case you get stuck.

I do think there is another reason, which is that the Windows CMD is awful. If that's your only reference, I understand not wanting to learn it.
- Powershell is pretty interesting but I haven't learnt much of it and it's hard to discover commands, arguments and fields within results. All the commands have really similar generic names and cryptic mnemonics. And an annoying amount of them are text based and don't actually interoperate with the ecosystem.
  I'm more used to slinging around text with bash and the basic Linux utilities so I'm not inclined to learn more than I have to on the Windows side.
No one is "afraid" of terminals. We just don't have spare time to learn a whole new fucking language.
- We just don’t have spare time to learn a whole new fucking language.
  well one should always try to consider the amount of time that can be saved, the complexity that is required to establish it and the potential time required to maintain it.
  related:
  https://xkcd.com/1205/
  https://xkcd.com/1319/
- How is that different from being afraid of terminals?
  It's not like you have to learn everything there is to it at once, you know.
I am a huge noob in the terminal, but --help, man, and basic knowledge about things like grep and pipes make me look like a wizard sometimes.
Let me tell you a story of checking a signature and unzipping an exercise file for uni every week on my linux distro that was named 01_ML-exercise_Bayesian-sep.zip.gpg followed by 02-Ml-exercise-FisherLinearDiscriminant.zip.gpg

Why do you need a gui for a timer? Just use sleep number && mpv someMusic.mp3

Why do people even use a Desktop Environment, so many GUIs !!!
- DEs are bloat anyway
Wat
- Fair
I actually never considered using sleep like that. Neat!
- I use from time to time when i don't wanna spend to much time doing something like playing games

As a Windows Infrastructure admin, I love this one.... and some of the responses. Perfect.

/crys in PowerShell

powershell is pretty great for windows tbh. I use arch and i love python and shell scripts but on windows powershell gets shit done. PS is great for vmware too. There's a lot of 'microsoft bad' that i agree with but powershell is not one of them.
- Oh for sure, if we didn't have Powershell, I really would be crying,!
  Deploy reg fixes to 100s of machines? Check. Check hotfix install status? Check. Audit local admin group members? Check.
  Even our PE build environment is all run off a Posh script.
Write-Host "sob"

I used to be a user that was all about the terminal, but then i realized that gui apps have advantages

ubuntu unity user: oh yes we do

Unity was great. I hope the project to keep it going is successful.

You can see the characters in the terminal what more do you want?

I want to be attached to them, know their backstory and motivation, ya feel?

This is only Arch by the way. Most distros have pretty good forums

How much do you think you're going to be using it?

Just this once.

Hello noobs! I'll let you in on a secret. Pros use command line interface (CLI) both on Linux and on Windows for a lot of tasks. You know why? Because it's easier. Be like the pros, choose the easy path, use CLI!

I use Bash and PowerShell often, and I'm fairly proficient in both. I also use a GUI in both Linux and windows as well.
Although, I might just be insane.
- Same here. I didn't imply that we only use CLI. Simply that for a lot of tasks CLIs are easier than GUIs. And therefore the CLI aversion is something to shed. The reverse is also true for other tasks too. Windows has historically put many tasks easier achieved via CLI behind a GUI. You wouldn't see me dead playing videos via CLI. I'd launch Plex, search and play instead. 🥲
Also if you meet a pro they will be happy to walk you through the GUI (if available) or CLI depending on what you feel comfortable with.
- Depending on the time availability of that pro. Sometimes I have the time to tailor to the needy's sensibilities. Other times all I can do spit out what I have whether it's GUI or CLI, take it or leave it.

Forget gui, I just want to git clone something and then type the name of the application I cloned into a command and have it run. None of this infinite searching for dependencies that didn't get installed with the initial run dependency installer.

I use Arch btw, and we don't have this kind of problems usually. Everything is in the repo, all the dependancies are accounted for. Or if not, they are in the repo.
I use Arch btw.
Exactly why Docker was created
- I would rather use Snap than Docker
  Fuck Docker and their bullshit pricing schemes

Agreed but it is easy to copy paste terminal commands.

Not so convincing if you're just a causal user that has to trust random strangers with a unknown command that could just bork your whole OS.
- Not wrong. Luckily I can read Bash at a middle school level lol. When in doubt, don't.
Assuming you can find one that actually does what you want
- I mean, it obviously depends on what you're doing, but usually it's easier to find the right command than the right GUI, because implementing a CLI is a magnitude less work than implementing a GUI...
- Easy, you just spin up a new instance for each tutorial you find, copy paste all of them, and keep whichever is still working
  CI/CD bro

Honestly having such easy access to cli tools is very nice for when you want to work on a machine that doesn’t have a gpu

...I mean... he is not wrong.

#yearofthelinuxdesktop

eh, the cli is easier to use, anyway

Usually.
But have you ever used arandr ? Literal godsend.
- Yeah, xrandr can suck my dongle

arandr is the only GUI settings I insist on using.

which i usually only need for first time setup for my monitors then save the configuration to a script

bash noob

Shells offer a significantly faster and more powerful way of running programs when you know how to use them. The "helpful" Windows user is kneecapping the noob by offering a shiny but limiting GUI. Once you get a grasp of basic command line tools, you'll wonder why you bothered with pointing and clicking stuff.

I feel like the shell becomes much more complicated when you want to use configs. Or anything other than basic commands. At that point it becomes a pain in the ass, or tedious.
Other than that I agree. Also, GUI file managers are still superior. Sue me.
- I still don't get why people like vim. Like sure, I use it to edit config files and stuff that needs sudo permissions, but in all honesty, if I could use any gui for that, like Kate, I wouldn't see any reason for using vim. Why do I need to relearn years how to Ctrl+ f or exiting the editor? buT iT'S FaStEr. Really? You spend how long looking up guides and cheat sheets on how to use it and it's faster? I mean sure, use what you are comfortable with but can you really say it's that much faster than just any text editor out there?
And everything can be easily automated on shells, i love how i can setup a task on my pc and once finished send a request over wifi to my phone and use termux to generate a notification
It's a matter of choice.