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Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

You mean 90's Linux?

Are you claiming that using Linux in 2023 will not pretty much require "command line fiddling" to some unavoidable degree (unless you have somebody else do the setup for you and day to day just use what's there)? Because, if so, that would very much not be my experience. Broadly speaking, what advancements am I likely missing out on?

Depends on distro and usage, but once installed Linux does not need command line fiddling. There are GUIs for installing and updating the OS and applications and pretty much everything else an average user does.

In that case I will have to disagree. I run a stock, up to date Ubuntu. Yes, there is a GUI for a lot of things, but I will most certainly run into something that will require me to drop to the CLI before long – which I am fine with, but I am not going to pretend it won't inevitably happen.

My experience is: On Windows, for most enduser use cases (and this absolutely excludes anything dev related), I would expect the user to get by without touching the CLI. In fact, I would assume that any given application will expose all of its functionality only through a graphical UI. For me, on Linux, the opposite expectation applies.

also nothing in linux will ever just give some cryptic hex code error or crash report.

It's either crashdump or nice error message. If not I just increase loglevel to find the actual problem.

I disagree. On stock Ubuntu, there is no normal situation you'll run into where you must use a terminal. If you decide to do something that requires a terminal, that's a different story. But basically every normal operation you'd do on windows GUI (and more...), you have a GUI option available on Ubuntu; it is the Windows of the Linux world, and it behaves as such.

Cmon my ubuntu stock can't even remember my sound input options, which are reset on each reboot. There's no option for that on the GUI. Also upgrading linux can be a big pain for non-experts. I've been using dualboot windows/linux for a long time, and I simply don't upgrade ubuntu: I'll do a fresh install if I want/need the new version.

Yeah, in OpenSUSE I'd just rollback a bad update like this. Automatic snapshotting before and after all package manager operations is very nice.

Hey! Some of us still use Linux the old "hacker command line" way

It doesn't mean that you have to.

It's hard to avoid. I know I can open the GUI file manager to look at a directory, and sometimes I try to force myself to do that, but way too often I quickly open a terminal and type a "ls" command. It's just what I got used to when I first started using computers back in the 1990s, and habits can be hard to break.

I use arch btw, and even then with zsh, shell highlighting, annotations, fuzzy finder and vim on steroids, the "hacker way" can be really different from two decades ago.

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