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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • As a newcomer to CLIs, GUI are great because you don’t need to know what you’re looking for. I can just open the devices window, and they’re all there, with most of the extra hardware stuff that’s not actually a real device already cleaned out.

    To do the same with a CLI would take me 10 minutes of looking up what the hardware commands are, 5 minutes figuring out flags, and 30 minutes researching entries to see if they’re important. Even just a collapsible list would make that last step so much easier. And no, I can’t grep for what I need, because I don’t know what I need, I just know something in there is important with a vague idea of what it might look like.

    Once I figure that all out for one thing, the best I can do is write that to a notes file so I don’t need to search so far next time, but there’s a good chance that I’ll need a different combination of commands next time anyway.

    Not hating on CLIs, just wishing I could figure out how to use them faster.



  • I’d say a Control Panel, I miss the plethora of authoritive knowledge and settings for every program, device, driver, network, user, and a dozen more things besides, all findable by browsing and not remembering dozens of commands. Of course I’d miss that either way, because Control Panel has been gutted every new version of windows since XP, but it was once nice.

    The Start menu context menu, or SUPER+X, is still nice, although mostly for avoiding poor UI choices and slow menus. The fact that many useful options are guaranteed to be there on every windows machine is nice though.

    And I would also say Event Viewer, despite how incredibly clunky it is to use. Having one place to check all system logs and track crashes of all kinds was quite useful.

    Basically, windows at one point went out of it’s way to centralize settings and info, and that’s just not possible in Linux without a lot of setup.


  • I believe they’re talking about the W11 context menu, where most common options (like copy, paste, and delete) are replaced by icons that look almost identical to each other. They’re all soft rounded lines and have no defining features, which means you need to stop and parse the icon twice for every cut & paste. They also change position based on which options are available, so you can’t memorize the locations, and since delete is one of the options, I wouldn’t trust my memory.

    Most of the interesting options like edit, run as administrator, open file location, readable copy paste options, or installed options like Edit with Notepad++ or 7zip > are hidden behind a Show more Options option, which just opens the window 10 context menu. Same styling and everything.

    Basically, everything about the W11 context menu slows me down and nothing about it is more usable or helpful.




  • It’s party marketing, yes, but it’s also Quality of Life features. Windows either has a setting you can find by farting around in the settings or it doesn’t work. Linux can have every setting, but most of them need CLI work, research, and the wherewithal to unfuck whatever you fucked.

    If CLIs could be listed, explained, and parametrized in a simple GUI, it would make learning them 10x easier. More default scripts for unfucking things would also help (like Window’s old troubleshooting wizards). More status checking and better error messages, so one can tell when something is broken without manually inspecting every module.

    It’s gotten much better, and will certainly improve by necessity if more average users pick Linux up, but it’s a step that has to be taken before Linux sees a major marketshare, regardless of marketing.