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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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So I am a new Linux user (Bazzite) and what I have experienced so far is that for my daily driver use I don't need the terminal at all. But the moment I want to do anything even slightly more complex, or even just to use a program I want that is not in bazaar, all the user documentation gives me terminal commands.
So while I am sure it is possible, in reality the terminal still remains prominent and it feels really important to know to use it.
Yes, generally you can. I run Linux Mint and can count the number of times that I HAD to use the terminal. There are plenty of times where I choose to use the terminal because it's faster though.
over the years i've had trouble with the various app stores like Discover and Pop!_Shop which for me led to the use of the terminal. other than that there is the occasional permissions issue that may have a graphical solution but i've always used chown on the command line.
I've been using Bazzite for a year without ever touching the terminal. I came from Windows.
Fellow Windows-to-Bazzite migrant here
I had to use the terminal to address some Nvidia driver weirdness, but aside from that, I really don't use it much if at all.
The terminal feels to me like it did on Windows - a useful tool to troubleshoot things - rather than a necessity.
This is also coming from someone who isn't uncomfortable using a CLI, but just prefers GUI for my day-to-day tasks.
Just lie and say they will never need to touch the terminal, then help them out when they need to and eventually they will see its not a big deal
I rarely touch my terminal and do so only because I am already familiar with it. I should use it more. I don't think its any more necessary to use the terminal in linux than it is in windows for a computer user. I consider zorin the most user friendly and mainly because its out of the box (when its installed it has software already on that fits for most things people want to do with a computer.)
Nope. Every Linux distribution I’ve used has needed access to command line at some point. If anything goes awry people will always give you steps how to fix it from command line.
Now I’m not saying all this couldn’t be done graphically, but you very rarely find steps that way.
I kind of 'force-moved' my wife to Fedora about 2 years ago, and she had never seen the terminal until last week. I saw she was about to open 'discover' to update everything, and I stopped her, opened the terminal and ran a dnf update, one 'put your password in there', and she was looking at it as if it was magic. Can you use it without the terminal entirely? Pretty sure you can. Now, should you?
Can I? Yes. Will I? No.
Some things are just faster to do via terminal so I learned to use it over GUI for some scenarios.
SUSE has had graphical administration tools for literally decades. Somehow people always forget that.
Installing stuff works well from UI as well? I on/off did stuff with Ubuntu and every time I tried the App Store there was useless.
IMO the gnome store is lacking. Fedora KDE has Discover for it's store. It has more buttons (GASP) and has easier control over which additional repos are shown in the store.
Yes, of course.
My gf and I are on Kubuntu. The only CLI she needs is to start her G13 kb, otherwise she is GUI only, even when I set up her machine it was all through GUI. Myself, I do CLI stuff cause it is often easier for me, lsblk/lsusb/mount broken ntfs drives(Ok this one I need after the occasional reboot til I get a new media drive), but I don't NEED to use it except for my G13 kb and the broken ntfs drive for now. ymmv.
I think Fedora is an excellent choice. It has up to date packages and its integration with KDE Plasma is pretty good.
Yes it is possible. I never need the terminal. If you are interested, you can usually find a GUI way if you look for one. Some people just don't look, then tell people there is no GUI for it. Not very helpful for newbies.
For those not into usability, different people work in different ways. Visual workers are not the same as text workers. So for some, CLI has poor usability and productivity. For lots of things I do, there isn't a CLI anyway.
I use Kubuntu these days. It could be better.
I'm torn on this discussion. Full disclosure, I don't really understand GUIs and get confused with icons and such. I'm a command-line person and have been for decades. I'll use image editors and IDEs and so on but they often leave me frustrated.
That said, I totally get that other people are not the same, and that's completely valid. If a regular task can only be done from the command line then there's an opportunity to fill in the missing piece, the GUI. It's not a waste of time, even if the GUI is "less efficient" - it's what a lot of people find comfortable.
Where I fall on the other side is the rise of ChatGPT and its friends. People are overwhelmingly positive about typing their problems into a text box, but when the response is "paste this into a terminal window and press enter" they bail out. They're happier to go through a dozen screenshots showing them where to click through menus to get to the option visually, even if they have to try multiple times because the GUI changes with the direction of the wind and the terminal stays consistent.
Yes. I agree these chatbots are another text interface like a CLI. So to me that's again a barrier to usability when I wish to refer to graphical or linked logical items on my screen that don't have any text description. I don't work in a purely text world, where usually there are no CLI commands for what im doing.
Its likely these people find a chat bot easier as they don't need to memorise a command plus modifiers exactly letter perfect. Where one mistype can fail, or worse. Two big issues people have with a CLI. And the chatbot output is made readable too. Where on a CLI it's hard to know if something worked, not being familiar with the terminology it spits out.
I hate llms, but honestly some sort of local one that wasn't trained on the orphan crushing machine thats integrated into the terminal could really help people. But I dont think it needs to be an llm. Just a cleverly coded lookup program like fish or tldr. Something where I can type "audio" and get settings for audio to show up with brief explanations so I can troubleshoot.
I myself forget commands a lot and have a notepad file (that I made an alias for so I can open it super fast from terminal) . But most peolle find this batshit insane that youd have to do that in 2026 and i get made fun of a lot. I myself like the simplicity.
> i get made fun of a lot.
Yes. They don't understand you need a way that works for you. We are all different. There is no one-size-fits-all.
The allergy to CLI is always strange to me. Computers didn't always have mice, or GUIs, and people had to learn them when they came around. It's like saying "I want to ride a bike but I don't want to learn how." After a certain point, I don't really know what to say to something like that. You have to learn how to do anything that is new to you. That doesn't make it bad, or even necessarily difficult...but anything you don't know will be unfamiliar, and one just has to be OK with that for a while until it's not anymore. I think the usability of most mainstream distros is right where it should be. GNOME and KDE have done a very good job of it (edit: barring some very important accessibility concerns, which the GNOME and KDE teams have both shown to be open to learning from and improving on).
Its the age-old "new good, old bad!" Thinking of unintelligent people. Theyre unable to realize when something is just good.
Like a non-javascript web page. My friends think I'm on the dark web if I send them something that isnt off of corponet with shiny beveled buttons with shadows and shading.
Not saying the opposite either; guis are fine if theyre well designed and use words instead of meaningless symbols. But a lot of them arent well designed.
Also, for dyslexic people the terminal is a big challenge, near impossible.
The allergy to CLI is always strange to me.
I get it. Every single other application a GUI user has used in their life: Ctrl-C = copy, and Ctrl-Z = undo. Open the terminal, and now Ctrl-C is an interupt, and Ctrl-Z is like a pause. Every terminal emulator has the option to change these keymappings. But doing that has a bunch of consequences once you start running more than basic file operations and nano. I think this is usually the first big hurdle to get over. It's muscle memory that needs to be suppressed.
And then there's the documentation aspect. With a GUI, you can visually look around to see what can be done in a program. With the CLI, there's options that you just kinda have to know. There's -h or --help, then there's the man pages. But even just navigating the man pages brings up the previous problem of unfamiliar/unintuitive keybindings. so you could also install tldr for faster help, but the vast majority of the time, it'll be faster to just search online.
All that being said, I prefer the CLI for pretty much everything, and think it would be interesting if there was a sort of pedagogical distro to teach the command line. Imagine a file browser that displays the underlying utilities/commands being used. Like, when you open your home folder maybe there's a line showing 'ls -al /home/me | grep [whatever params to get the info being displayed]'. Or, when you go into the settings, it shows you the specific text files being edited for each option. Something that just exposes the inner workings a little more so that people can learn what they're actually doing as they're using the GUI
Different user types have different capabilities. Some think in terms of text. Others are more visual. Neither is wrong. Just like a left handed person is not wrong. Good usability is about adapting the software to the person. Not the person to the software. For a lot of what I do there is no text command. And for many, the CLI is an unfamiliar interface. So it's a productivity disadvantage to switch over to a CLI just for a single command when the rest of the time you are in a GUI.
Not a chance. Someone else can easily, but I wouldn't be able to resist.
Using Linux Mint, most of what I use I could without terminals if I wish. However, just like with Windows, terminal intervention will be needed sooner or later, usually to figure out why a given program isn't working.
Exactly. You can get away without using the terminal on a lot of linux distros in the same way you can get away without using CMD on Windows... until one very specific thing breaks and suddenly it's time to run sfc /scannow for the millionth time.
It depends.
A 2-5 year-old laptop, you want to web browse, maybe watch some videos, use google docs or open office, you probably never need a terminal
If it's a really new laptop or you want to get the most out of video drivers and push it harder, you'll probably need to be ready for some light terminal crap. Gets a little janky if you have a dual-video-card setup. Nothing hard to handle, but if you're not looking to have to handle anything...
I think the numnber of available packages is better on the Debian side. Mint or Kubuntu run newer hotter stuff, debian runs older more stable stuff.
I'd say 90% of usage can be done without the terminal especially if you just use Linux to browse the web or check email or other things that are mundane.
Anything past that, there is a good chance you'll have to use the terminal. That said, I think its easier than ever with lots of people making the switch and asking questions on Lemmy or other forums.
I use Fedora Workstation. I do use the terminal, each morning I install my updates by typing "sudo dnf upgrade" and enter the password. When that is done I type "syncthing" to start that service. The rest of the day I don't touch the terminal.
I could install the updates through the "software store" but terminal is faster and no reboot is required, afaik.
Once in a while I do update an app which is almost as easy. Download the rpm file (typically there is a link in the app that needs updating) open terminal, cd Downloads, ls, sudo dnf install "package name", password, exit.
For context, I started on Linux last April. Previous "laptop" was an android tablet with a physical keyboard and mouse. I did buy a used Thinkpad and install Fedora myself which was very easy.
My 75 year old father, who isn't a techie, can handle this. Your Window buds should be able to as well.
With Linux Mint you don't need the terminal 99% of the time. The rest distros are close to 95% of the time. I always suggest Mint to new users.
I cannot vouch for every distro and every use case out there, but for me, yes you can daily drive without having anything to do with terminal. Some distros have worked a lot ensuring this.
I would recommend to start with Linux Mint.
I know at least two people who have been using Ubuntu as a daily driver for years and have never (as in, ever) touched the terminal.
If you are just doing word processing, browsing the web, and playing video games then absolutely. Yes.
There have been gui tools available to install packages, configure networking/wifi, and manipulate files. For a long time now. Especially with the integration of Flatpak and snaps into gui-based package managers (like pop shop) it has become quite simple for any "regular", non-technical user to manage the basics and even the intermediates of any system (depending on the distro).
Where things will likely fall short is with troubleshooting. But to solve that we would need to build something like the windows troubleshooter. But with so applications owned by so many different groups it would be difficult/near impossible to write a troubleshooter to integrate them together.
Though I am also a bit of a hackerman so I probably also don't realize how much I use the terminal for normal things.
Yes, there are several distros that come with many things prepackaged. See Fedora, CachyOS, and Mint for examples.
Unless you install fresh, run into NO issues. And basically do nothing but websurf, and basic functions, not likely.
Keep in mind, even IF something could be done by GUI, if you ask for help, 95% of the replies are immediately going to tell you to open CLI...
Remember Linux isn't an OS, it is a collection of 30+ different OSs that are mostly compatible.
basically do nothing but websurf, and basic functions
That's 99% of what most people do.
Depends on what they are doing, but I guess it's pretty usable without cli interventions - at least for standard apps and unless something gets screwed. Fedora KDE.
Just as much as you can use Windows without the command line/powershell.
The vast majority of tasks do not require it but some will and some tasks will be easier via the terminal if you take the time to read 2-3 pages of documentation.
Don't be scared of the terminal
I installed Linux for my mother 15 years ago and she has never used the terminal once.
I update the Ubuntu from time to time and that’s it. Everything works and she can browse the internet, read email and listen to music.
As a Linux Mint user who has only used Linux Mint, Yes, I've hardly used the Terminal, I've really only used it to download & run specific Software which is really just optional most of the time.
I installed ubuntu for my father in 2010. He has no idea how PCs work, and he's been fine with it. And we are not even close.
I think Gnome + Flatpak is a great setup for GUI only. Fedora is annoying to set up with nonfree drivers and codecs, otherwise it's a great choice for this.
(Also, don't try convert your friends, just wait until they come to you and ask for help installing Linux.)