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.