It’s not a blank screen. It’s a canvas. You just don’t know how to paint.
I have too sneezed with a nosebleed, those are spurious allegations
I think it’s just been stigmatized by society as a whole for some mysterious reason. Didn’t a lot of our grandmothers slashed through terminals like fruit ninjas back in the day?
Heck yeah they did! I remember going over to my grandmothers house to use Word on her computer running DOS. She used that computer to keep her personal budget, do the accounting for her office supply business, write letters, and the newsletters for her church and social clubs. No gui, just a command line and some things that we would now call a TUI.
It was stigmatized by Windows, because the Windows terminal was terminally shitty. People swear to me that their new terminal is awesome, but I have my doubts. Microsoft seems to have a problem with making stuff that doesn’t suck.
You don’t have to touch the terminal. You just really, really should.
the issue with the terminal is that you can easily fuck up really badly if you don’t know what you’re doing.
the following look the same to a new user:
rcifconfig -r 0 -f puny -l allrctrl -r all -i root -f(both are imaginary made-up comments sothat you cannot just say "oh well obviously one does this and the other one does that)
then one goes on to nuke your home directory while the other one restarts the wifi adapter.
(and this can actually happen in practice. consider all the “always remove the french language pack” jokes that has been going around for years.)
for graphical user interfaces, you typically have icons to help you give a sense of what it’s doing, typically warning signs before you do anything dangerous, etc.
I’ve heard the jokes about
rm -rf /. I’ve never met anybody who’s taken it seriously and nuked their system.That command is legendary. It’s one of the first bits of computer lore I ever learned, about 10 years before I ever touched Linux. In fact, at that time I knew two things about Linux: it’s a free OS and don’t do
rm -rf /.Of course you should do some research first, so that you’re sure that you know what a command does, but if you’re getting it from a forum like Stack Overflow or even reddit, you can be reasonably sure that if the commenter was trying to destroy your computer they’d get downvoted and one of the other commenters would warn you about it. Don’t treat Linux like it’s some kind of minefield that you have to tiptoe around. It isn’t conducive to learning.
I think the real issue with the modern terminal, and Linux in general, is that we are using tools designed for programmers and system admins, who are expected to know exactly what they are doing, to build and run servers and treating them like they are end user tools. My grandmother was perfectly happy using a terminal for the only computer she owned because the tools it provided were simple and had those built in protections in a way that bash never will be.
Somehow I am all three of these people at the same time.
Why is it constantly booting to a black screen with text?
This is easy, just install steam and go
Ahh the beauty of this Debian server, don’t even need to get out of my sofa because I have SSH on my phone.
The HTC Dream was the peak of Phone SSH.
There was no key combo I couldn’t input, no vim mode I couldn’t use!
There was a VNC client! I could RDP to Windows machines!
I could have even used EMACS!
I mean, I wouldn’t, I’m not some kind of monster, but I could have, and that’s what’s important!
Me, not being a programmer or sysadmin or whatever, booting into TTY just for shits and giggles, playing videos via mpv with -vo=tct just cause I think it looks funny
my poor cpu. You don’t even need to use
-vo=tctas mpv will draw to the frame buffer if x server is not available. There’s also fbi and fbpdf for displaying images and pdfs to the frame bufferNeat. Nearly watchable. I tried kitty/sixel options but those are too high-res and cause even more frame-drops (at least on the older hardware I tested it on, no drops playing with normal mpv), with a 360p video it’s isn’t scaled up.
Then again, I guess it’s a whole lot more watchable than the blinkenlights (Starwars) thing via telnet.
GUI is simpler because you have to remember a sequence of steps for every action you want to take and then memorize a bunch of keyboard shortcuts and then do it all again when they reinvent their product in two weeks.
CLI requires you to learn how your system is structured and where things are located and then you create scripts that last years. Not everyone wants to put in a bunch of effort just to use their computer.
Anyways Firefox just updated and they moved “save to collection” and a few other things so now I need to relearn some stuff. I hope my other apps don’t reinvent themselves anytime soon. Every update I know how to use them less and less.
A regular user will never in a million years create a script.
How will they transfer their pirated media to their NAS? Manually? Every time?
I think that depends how you define “regular user”.
(I assume this is like regulars in a “well regulated militia” right?)
With ai they can
And now they have bricked their computer.
Doesn’t matter, now that they can they will and AI won’t tell them no.
i used AI last week to modify the characters that get produced when i type special key combinations on my keyboard. after looking with classical search engines (duckduckgo, google) for about 20 minutes and getting confused with not much of a clear answer, i asked chatgpt and got the task done in 15 minutes and learned a whole lot while doing it, because it also explained exactly why the files are the way they are.
Terminal gang!
It does everything you need with ONE exception I’ve found: if you use it for your file manager (I do) and you find that you need to quickly select a few items based on image preview, it is not great. Now you can solve this with vifm or something, or just launch dolphin or something every once in awhile.
I use the terminal for terminal shit. File manager is not terminal shit (for me).
I usually open the terminal in my WM, then decide what I’m going to do. Force of habit
Have you used a terminal file manager with image preview like yazi? Or just a thumbnail viewer like lsix?
I didn’t know a thumbnail viewer existed, I will have to try. Historically I have used sxiv in tabbed mode and just tried to remember filenames which is obnoxious.
Oof, yeah that’s hard. yazi is a full tui file manager that can do image and other file previews, so you can flip through a directory, mark the files you want to move/delete/whatever, then hit the command to do it. lsix is basically ls for images, it generates and displays thumbnails for each file. Or can just do it from emacs.
Meanwhile many open source GUI apps are better or at least on par with their proprietary counterpart, but you can’t flex with them onto noobs.
Look I just switched over from Windows, I’m new to this shit lol. I enjoy using commands while I’m learning them but mostly I just copy/paste from instruction manuals on how to install shit I want installed. Makes me feel like a master hacker.
I’m a CLI enjoyer. It’s easier for me to define what I often do as a bash function than to remember which button to click in a GUI app. It’s easier for me to copy paste a StackOverflow answer than to zoom the screenshot only to find out that the UI has changed. And I’m too lazy to move my mouse when I can do it with a Neovim keymap.
TUI enjoyer 😏
Can’t and don’t want to are two different things.
I’d like to meet a Linux user who’s never had to touch the terminal.
read the rfc. ‘claude, what does the rfc say?’ the what?
