I have used Arch for >13 years (btw) and use the terminal every single session. I also work with Linux servers daily, so I tried the other families with DEs (Debian/Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS/AlmaLinux/Fedora).
I’m comfortable (and prefer) doing everything with CLI tools. For me, it’s a bit difficult to convert my Windows friends, as they all see me as some kind of hackerman.
What’s the landscape like nowadays, in terms of terminal requirements?
Bonus question: Which distribution is the most user-friendly while still updated packages? Does anything provide a similar experience to Arch’s amazing AUR?
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I choose to use terminal because I can update my software without requiring a restart (I used Debian btw); for some reason, GNOME’s Software app cannot do this without restarting. I also prefer terminal-based text-editing for coding and scripting.
Depending on use-case, you can absolutely just use the distro without ever touching the terminal. It requires extra work to sift through all the online advice and docs that center around CLI commands though. The Average Windows User won’t be digging that deep in their system to customize the shit out of it like an Arch user, so they won’t need to touch the stuff that can only be accessed via command line. The Above Average Windows User will already be comfortable with the command prompt anyway.
Which distribution is the most user-friendly while still updated packages?
All of them? Why would a distro choose to be hostile to its users? (/s)
I assume you mean “beginner friendly”? In that case, I would stick to Debian: more stability than windows, harder to break than Arch, and lighter-weight than Fedora.
Those are the only 3 I’ve daily driven in the past couple of years, and that’s my takeaways. I can’t give informed input on any of the popular derivatives, except Ubuntu which I did use for awhile (back in 2014-2016): it was more prone to breaking shit than Debian, less beginner-friendly too (fuck Snaps, and fuck your Pro subscription data-harvesting up-selling bullshit).
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.
Does anything provide a similar experience to Arch’s amazing AUR
I am not aware of any software distribution service with a comparable experience (massive userbase with zero vetting for uploaders) as Arch’s amazing AUR - if you are looking for a way to distribute malware to many unsuspecting people (who’s friends think they’re hackerman), it’s really unparalleled. (😢)
To your primary question, yes, many people do successfully daily drive various Linux distros without ever opening the terminal. 🙄
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 generally more of a text worker than visual, but good lord I hate CLIs.
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
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).
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
If a thing like that existed, I’d use it. Software that has graphical controls but also tells you exactly what it’s doing is my favourite, I’ve seen a small handful of it out there. The terminal is wicked cool, but the documentation and discoverability issue makes it a bit unapproachable.
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.
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.
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 /scannowfor the millionth time.I personally don’t understand why that command doesn’t run every time the system starts up by default, I wrote a script that ran it on startup years ago and I can’t tell you how many times it tells me that there were files that needed repairing.
There’s a sysd GUI that you can use to look at logs. It’s much faster to just refresh the UI than searching your history for the right command
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.
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.
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.
there’s three thing I use the terminal for:
Updating my apps and systems Running development apps Quick and easy edits or file movements
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.
turns off SteamDeck sorry, what’s a “terminal”? Isn’t it at the airport?
Jokes aside… yes, obviously, it only depends what you actually need to do. I recommend though NOT to be afraid of the terminal. The whole point about using Linux is to do whatever one wants. If that means avoiding the terminal, sure, that’s fine, BUT I believe the goal still is to be able to do MORE and the terminal is itself a very powerful tool. It’s not the terminal itself as much as the composability of the CLI.
So… finding a distribution with all the GUI and TUI and avoiding the CLI until they actually want to use them is great. Avoiding it entirely because no new skill was acquired is a missed opportunity IMHO. I want more Linux users, yes, but I also want BETTER users of any OS. Skilling up users so that we can all do more, together.
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.
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.
Yes, of course.
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.
