Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

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Gaming/WSL kept me on Windows for a lot of the last decade, however after Windows 10 became EOL'd and Windows started turning into ad/spyware I finally gave it up over a year ago after 25+ years on Windows Desktops.

Anyway Linux is liberating, Fedora Desktop is great, no ads in the OS, a Software Store/Installer I actually like to use, curated by usefulness instead of scam Apps. All my Windows Steam Games I frequently use just worked, I have to login to X11 for 1 title (MK11), but everything else runs in the default Wayland desktop. Although I'll still check protondb.com before purchasing new games to make sure there'll be no issues. Thanks to Docker, JetBrains IDEs and most Daily Apps I use are cross-platform Desktop Web Apps (e.g. VS Code, Discord, Obsidian, etc) I was able to run everything I wanted to.

The command-line is also super charged in Linux starting with a GPU-accelerated Gnome terminal/ptyxis and Ghostty running Oh My Zsh that's enhanced with productivity tools like fzf, eza, bat, zoxide and starship. There's also awesome tools like lazydocker, lazygit, btop and neovim pushing the limits of what's possible in a terminal UI and distrobox which lets me easily run Ubuntu VMs to install experimental software without impacting my Fedora Desktop.

Image editors is the one area still lacking in Linux. On Windows I used Affinity Designer/Photo and Paint.NET for quick edits. On macOS I use Affinity & Pixelmator. On Linux we have to chose between Pinta (Paint.NET port), Krita and GIMP which are weaker and less intuitive alternatives. But with the new major release of GIMP 3 and having just discovered photopea.com things are starting to look up.

I hardly find anything interesting about command-line, I grew up in a time where the command line was the only way to interact with home computers, it fails on me the interest on staying stuck in up to early 1980's computing model.

Xerox PARC is the future many of us want to be in, not PDP-11 clones.

Weird flex, most commands, utilities, server software and remote tools are going to be run are going to be from the command-line. All our System Administration of remote servers uses the command-line as well since exclusively deploying to Linux for 10+ years.

Sure you can happily avoid the command-line with a Linux Desktop and GUI Apps, although as a developer I don't see how I could avoid using the terminal. Even on Windows I was using WSL a lot, it's just uncanny valley and slow compared to a real Linux terminal.

Sadly, because many of the authors live stuck in UNIX cli model instead of Xerox PARC REPL approach.

It is like praising Ratatui for what Turbo Vision, Clipper and curses were doing in 1990's, if I wanted that I would kept using Xenix and MS-DOS.

REPL-ify your command line then? There's nothing that says you have to be stuck on bash for your command line needs. https://www.nushell.sh/

Already doing that a much as possible.

There are huge interoperability advantages to CLI and TUI tools. Composing them, using script(1) on them, etc, are much simpler than the same for GUI tools. They are also much easier to rapidly iterate on.

GUIs are very useful but they are not clearly better (or worse) than CLIs.

> Weird flex, most commands, utilities, server software and remote tools are going to be run are going to be from the command-line.

It's not a weird flex. Weird flex is this: "The command-line is also super charged in Linux starting with a GPU-accelerated Gnome terminal/ptyxis and Ghostty running Oh My Zsh" and then listing a bunch of obscure personal preference tools that follow trends du jour.

That’s not a flex, it requires no skill to install software, they’re just some of the better tools you can install to boost productivity in Linux terminals. I doubt they’re obscure to any Linux CLI user who spent time on improving the default OOB UX of bash terminals.

And you just alias them, so you can keep using the core utility names to use them.

None of those tools are obscure, they might just seem like it from the perspective of mouse dependent vscode users.

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