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Comment by PowerElectronix | Hacker News Reader

We're getting there. But I doubt your average joe will ever use anything that may require even once to type something on a terminal.

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The average Joe? My wife has used Linux since the mid-2000's. Her career was in Sales, far removed from anything technical. She loves Linux compared to Windows, her new laptop came with Windows and she bugged my for months to upgrade it to Linux, which I did recently. She doesn't use the terminal at all. Kubuntu, btw.

The thing is now the average Joe doesn't need to. Just tell Claude to fix it

Imagine if different sectors worked like that. To go to a restaurant, each customer brings their own private chef to let loose in the kitchen.

Wouldn't it make more sense for OS makers to "tell Claude" to make a user friendly GUI for their terminal commands?

Funnily enough the terminal which was the reason people said linux is too much of a hassle is the very thing that now makes it so you can easily fix your computer with natural language.

Sure the problem is it will still come with problems out of the box but that's mostly on laptop manufacturers. At least now you can easily fix them with an agent.

For me it's much more fun to tell my computer what I want and to get it than to scroll through a settings GUI but to each his own

That's what KDE (and gnome, to a lesser extent) have been trying to do for a long while.

The fundamental issue is that a GUI is a static abstraction over a CLI that allows for millions of potential combinations. You can only expose so many options in a menu before the interface becomes completely unusable.

To expand on your analogy, it’s like running a restaurant that only uses automated vending machines to serve food. It works perfectly fine if someone just wants toasted bread. But the moment a customer asks for more than toasted bread, you're toasted.

Imho, the best bet for the future is a bunch of pre loaded llm skills and clis an agent can work with: getting the chef to use pre-approved hardware, sorta, that can cook up anything that is needed.

> The fundamental issue is that a GUI is a static abstraction over a CLI that allows for millions of potential combinations. You can only expose so many options in a menu before the interface becomes completely unusable.

But is that an issue? Macs have had this solved for almost half a century: You expose things in the GUI that normal people need, not everything. For hackers, they can still go to the command line to hack.

> > The fundamental issue is that a GUI is a static abstraction over a CLI that allows for millions of potential combinations. You can only expose so many options in a menu before the interface becomes completely unusable. > > But is that an issue? Macs have had this solved for almost half a century: You expose things in the GUI that normal people need, not everything. For hackers, they can still go to the command line to hack.

Good point. I'd say, Linux has inherent complexity across multiple dimensions (less hardware integration, multiple stacks (is it running systemd-networkd ? Or maybe dns

macOS also exposes more advanced things through the GUI but not by default. Its largely undiscoverable, but holding option before clicking something generally offers more options (e.g., hold option and click wifi in the menu bar to get all the detailed connection information).

I like that method, keeps the default GUI clean but still offers GUI options for most things if you know where to look.

I agree but its becoming increasingly clear that "chatbot-as-the-CLI" is likely a "worse is better" situation. It's clearly crappier and slower than just hitting a button, but everyone knows what they want and they know how to put it into text. CLIs in the past never could cope because they relied on exacting, esoteric syntax, so mere mortals had to learn a lot about how to translate what they want "Send a copy of this photo to my friend Sally". So a button is abstracted that says "Send" and "Attach" and some file-based metaphor is built up to allow the work to map better to what people know and understand and can intuit.

My mom can't find the button in the GUI though, and odds are it would be buried in menus she'd get lost in. She can type "Send Sally this picture" into a box and hit go. Anyone literate can.

One thing that's been really useful for many years is the Help menu in MacOS. You click it and start typing the command you are looking for, and MacOS conveniently opens the menu and any submenus and shows you the command with a big blue arrow. Wouldn't this be easy to pair with a simple AI, so that people can more freely type what they want to do? Maybe even make it Spotlight accessible.

I like the visual and thus get along much better with drag-and-drop than any text based interface. So for me (and maybe your mom) the best solution would be that Sally was a window you could open and drag things to. Surprised that Apple and nobody else ever did this on desktop. At least on iOS, your friends are pictures that appear whenever you press share, but it's not perfect.

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