Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
Dr. Quadragon ❌'s posts Post Back to profile
Top-level
Шуро

It is nice to have both. Console commands are good for exact instructions and batch mode but the lack of visual guidance is a bitch.

GUI allows to do something even when you don't exactly know what it is called or where it is and it HUGE chunk of practical use cases. Especially when there are different distros or platforms involved.

There's a reason most stuff in our life has GUI :)

12 September at 12:42 | Wall-to-wall | Open on friends.deko.cloud
6 comments
Dr. Quadragon ❌

@shuro Yes, it's nice to have both.

I'm just talking from the documentation writing perspective. If you want the reason why there's more guides that utilize the CLI - here it is. And that might be part of the reason why Linux is associated mostly with CLI: there's just way more Linux guides on the Internet that use it.

12 September at 12:45 | Open on mastodon.ml
Шуро
I'm just talking from the documentation writing perspective. If you want the reason why there's more guides that utilize the CLI - here it is.


No.

Let's be honest - the main reason is that there is no GUI for these tasks or it sucks ass. Good stable GUI isn't hard to document either and you don't even need screenshots. "Go to App Store and install Firefox from there" is sufficient provided the said app store is working, easy to find and well-designed.

As for the writing docs... I agree but it depends on the application really. The goal of writing documentation is not to create documentation itself but to provide the user with assistance to get his task done - now and in the future. When we are talking about stuff like server components installation then sure, CLI rules. For some other things - not so much.

Also CLI documentation is often VERY version and environment dependent. There are tons of broken guides just because some config moved, version number changed or some parameter was renamed (and not necessarily in your application).

I'm just talking from the documentation writing perspective. If you want the reason why there's more guides that utilize the CLI - here it is.


No.

Let's be honest - the main reason is that there is no GUI for these tasks or it sucks ass. Good stable GUI isn't hard to document either and you don't even need screenshots. "Go to App Store and install Firefox from there" is sufficient provided the said app store is working, easy to find and well-designed.

12 September at 13:38 | Open on friends.deko.cloud
Dr. Quadragon ❌

@shuro

> Let's be honest - the main reason is that there is no GUI for these tasks or it sucks ass

Sorry, but this is just plain wrong. I don't even need to change the example, GUI for package management is basically a solved problem. There are plenty of package management GUIs, and most of them are good.

"Issue this command" is still more efficient to write.

12 September at 13:47 | Open on mastodon.ml
Шуро

Just fired up Gnome Software Center (or whatever it is called). It took good 15 seconds to start showing anything (which for average user means "something is broken"), search is counterintuitive and it offers Firefox from Flathub (I bet it wouldn't show anything if I had no Flatpak AND gnome extension installed before).

It is not a disaster but there's a lot of room for improvement.

And again it depends on how you view efficiency of your documentation. When it comes to package installation - most of the time it is true. When it comes to the rest of use cases - mostly there is no alternative anyway so it is easy to be efficient :)

Just fired up Gnome Software Center (or whatever it is called). It took good 15 seconds to start showing anything (which for average user means "something is broken"), search is counterintuitive and it offers Firefox from Flathub (I bet it wouldn't show anything if I had no Flatpak AND gnome extension installed before).

12 September at 14:02 | Open on friends.deko.cloud
Dr. Quadragon ❌

@shuro

> It took good 15 seconds to start showing anything

How old is your machine? It fires up instantly for me.

> I bet it wouldn't show anything if I had no Flatpak

Of course it wouldn't, as GSC is a flatpak GUI.

> AND gnome extension

Huh?

> And again it depends on how you view efficiency of your documentation

I define it as "easier to write and works for most cases".

12 September at 14:07 | Open on mastodon.ml
Шуро

T480 with 8GB and some kind of SSD :) And yes, it fires up instantly but then takes a theatrical pause before actually showing anything if it wasn't run recently. I guess it does something like "apt list" and "apt update" in the background and then parses it.

I think GSC needs gnome-software-plugin-flatpak to show flatpack repos (in addition to core package) which I have installed but I think it doesn't get installed by default.

As for everything else - again, you don't really have a choice in most cases. In Windows you can install and configure web server (IIS) both GUI and CLI way. In Linux it is mostly just CLI.

Actually I can't even think of anything except software installation where you can have reasonable choice between CLI and GUI approaches in Linux.

T480 with 8GB and some kind of SSD :) And yes, it fires up instantly but then takes a theatrical pause before actually showing anything if it wasn't run recently. I guess it does something like "apt list" and "apt update" in the background and then parses it.

I think GSC needs gnome-software-plugin-flatpak to show flatpack repos (in addition to core package) which I have installed but I think it doesn't get installed by default.

12 September at 14:22 | Open on friends.deko.cloud
Go Up