A Command Line vs. GUI Meeting | Hacker News Reader

A Command Line vs. GUI Meeting

gravitational.com

43 pointsgk111 comments

Surprising or not but this is the issue of user perception. If grandma wants to run her old windows programs on the Ipad and it isn't available on the appstore, why cant she just put them on the usb stick and install as she done with her last device: tablet-laptop? These questions do come up from technology naive people. In the same vein the distinction between GUI and cli isn't in capabilities but in user mindset. Just because you can bridge things with dmenu on your linux machine doesn't mean it should be default. All kinds of edge cases will inevitably emerge whether you like it or not so the user needs to do an informed decision, so don't force your own strange preferences when designing application. In the linux world, look at GNOME, they implement very opinionated changes and test those on they peers. GNOME is getting "better" for some power users and becomes unusable for the regular normies.

GNOME is getting "better" for some power users and becomes unusable for the regular normies.

My decade long perception was that GNOME was changing to target normal users at the expense of power users. It appears they are failing both ways?

I don’t have much personal experience with GNOME so I can’t comment on that specifically, but I’ve worked on making a primarily dev-focussed product more friendly to marketers in an attempt to speed up their workflow. The problem was we did that based on out perception of how marketers think of the platform to drive the changes. Long story short, it made the devs more frustrated and it was still too technical for the marketers.

With a sufficiently large pile of extensions I'm finding gnome just fine as a power user.

It's sadly the only DE where enough attention to detail has been applied to many parts of the UI. Even if I disagree with certain UI choices, they have been executed exceptionally well.

Really interesting article! I work exclusively in the realm of GUIs, but I like reading articles about the interactions that users have with CLIs as I feel that lots of UX people operate in the realm of GUIs and forget that CLIs are also a vector for user interaction.

The one ssh app built on web technology that gets this 100% right is Blink on the iPad

a little pricey but agreed, 100% worth it. best terminal emulator i have tried on iOS

In addition to the price of the client itself ($20 seems like a fair price to pay for high quality software): If you spin up some AWS services while SSH'd into a box using Blink, doesn't Apple rightfully deserve a 30% commission on the payments to AWS?

Unless Blink is getting a share of that money to AWS then no.

Absolutely. I usually email them a cheque with a note of the instances I've spun up.

real OGs don't maximize terminal space. maximum terminal space is 80x25

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