Glad I could help.
The thing is, though, that command line instructions work on most flavours of whatever distro you have running. If you have an xfce problem it’s fair game to tell you where to click, but if your issue is not related to your desktop environment, giving a solution that works on most, if not all, systems that may have the same issue, is actually a good idea. No?
And many folks have headless setups — raspberry pis, home servers, VPSs, etc. It’s kinda overkill to install a desktop environment on a headless box if the only reason you need it is so you can VNC into it for a simple task that could be done over ssh.
Yes! Command line instructions are often universal instructions. This is imho a huge boon for Linux.
I use xfce and i like it so far, though it would be good if i could increase the minimize/maximize/tray toolbar’s size
As long as I’m mocking help forums, I might have a stupid solution for your window decorations, which you can follow at your own risk. I saw your comment and, just out of curiosity, started playing around in a VM with imagemagick, a program I’ve never used before, but that might be useful for you. Here’s what I did:
1.) I copied a theme I liked, in this case “Sassandra”, from /usr/share/themes into ~/.themes.
2.) I renamed Sassandra (in ~/.themes) to Sassandra2 and switched themes to Sassandra2.
3.) I opened up some of the images in ~/.themes/Sassandra2/xfwm4/ and made note of the geometry of the buttons. In this case, they were 24x17.
4.) I opened a terminal in ~/.themes/Sassandra2/xfwm4/ and ran a command I got from an AI chatbot and fiddled with it blindly like an idiot until it ran:
find . -type f -exec magick {} -scale 12x17 {} ;
In this case, I wanted to use magick to shrink the icons from 24x17 to 12x17 (though you could just as easily replace “12x17” with an increased size instead), and I wanted to do all the files at once, using the find command as suggested by my robot overlord. It didn’t work as I intended. I never bothered to read any docs. I’m not even sure I put the “{}” in the right spot. But it did shrink the images, preserving the aspect ratio. It also threw up a couple errors because I forgot about the readme and themerc files in that directory. Speaking of which, you can fiddle with the themerc file to make any minor adjustments, like offsetting text.
Edit: In retrospect, the original image files were actually all different sizes and now Sassandra2 looks like crap, but you can always run magick on files individually.
There must be other ways to do it
*Advice
No wonder OP is afraid of the terminal, you can’t misspell left-click.
I’m dyslexic and the terminal can be a challenge some days
Now that’s a better reason for looking for a GUI solution than the OP had. I hadn’t really considered how dyslexia would affect CLI usage.
It’s not a universal effect. Some dyslexics or people with related challenges like dysgraphia will find the CLI easier.
That’s interesting. I’ve often wondered what it must be like programing or using the CLI if you aren’t familiar with the English language, but I hadn’t considered the dyslexia/graphia type issues.
Just to give you some extra impressions:
My brain mixes up all letters with the same/similar form (regardless of rotation or flip) - so I often mix up [d, b, p, q] or [a, e] or [u, n] when typing. And then I read the command 20 times over until I find which letter got mixed up, because my brain autocorrects to the right command when reading.
It helped to use the Dyslexie font in the terminal, because it makes those shapes more unique distinct. (not to be confused with open dyslexic which did not help me at all).
Also asking an AI to correct the command is huge, but takes time.
But man GUI has none of the hassle, it says what the button will do when you click it, so you click it and it does that. How wonderful is that, ay?
Also asking an AI to correct the command is huge, but takes time.
I use shell_gpt with a custom prompt bound to a hotkey that dumps my current terminal line into a local (Deepseek) AI which is prompted with some information about my system and a preferred reply format.
For example, I’ll type:
rsync movies/ media server but also do it recursivelyThen press CTRL+L and a bash script copies the terminal input into a prompt that requests the AI return a properly formatted terminal command which it places into the terminal input. This way I can know what I want to do and forget the exact switch or option.
A different hotkey (CTRL+O) sends the terminal input to a Chatbot prompt for one-off answers.
I’m doing a bit more on the backend now (RAG using man pages, for example) for the Ctrl L command, but I used it with a simple prompt for several months. It’s like having a slight more intelligent tab completion.
I just have really bad memory from a combo of ADHD and weed. Remembering where in the GUI to fix something is a lot easier than remembering commands. Especially when if I fuck up said command I could make the problem worse or make a whole new problem. GUI gives me visual landmarks that stick in my memory, and thats something the terminal doesn’t. Like navigating a city via landmarks vs via street signs. Tell me directions via streets I am lost, but tell me to go left after the walgreens on the river and now I know.
Me too. Just use tab and complete commands that way. Fish or zsh with oh-my-zsh is your friend.
Ha ha, even tab complete isn’t enough to help me some times
What are these “solutions” you speak of? All help forum posts must follow this format:
“I want to do x.”
“Why would you want to do x? Don’t do x.”.
I want to shoot myself in the foot
Why would you want to do that? Don’t do that?
Why are people so rude to me? I asked a question and they won’t answer it. The Linux community sucks
Yeah it sucks.
If I wanna shoot myself, let me shoot myself. Maybe I’m into that. Who are you to judge whats good for me?
Why would you want to shoot yourself? Don’t do x.
If you so desperately want to shoot yourself in the foot, put some effort into it and figure it out instead of asking strangers on the internet for free advice because you’re lazy. Not everyone is into enabling people mutilating their bodies.
I want to make a sandwitch and I know I can do this by shooting myself in the foot, no i don’t care this is bad practice just tell me how to make it work.
doesn’t tell them how to make it work, does not give enough instructions to make it work the “right” way
installs windows again
The Linux Community does suck…
Closed as Duplicate.(the post pointed to as the original is a post from 2013 deleted in 2018)
In many cases that kind of answer is correct though. People ask for things that aren’t a good idea on a regular basis. Sometimes what they want is correct for their circumstances, but often not.
I have no idea what this mean is even trying to say, but as someone who is trying to make the switch to Linux, it is a steep learning curve, even for the most “user-friendly” distros.
A lot of the information in forums assumes some sort of basic knowledge of code and processes which aren’t readily available. I’ve asked a few noob questions and while there are some helpful people out there, there are also a fuck load of assholes who seem to think they walked out the womb speaking Ubuntu.
So my message to those people is, if you’re not gonna be helpful, kindly keep your snide comments to yourself.
Yeah, I can confirm this. I’ve been using Linux for around two years at this point and having a Linux-using friend made the transition at the start way easier. Now I’m the Linux-using friend for all of my Linux-curious friends and it’s great.
If gou have an issue shoot me a message, I can’t guarantee anything but i’ll try to help
Shoot me a message too. I don’t know anything about Linux but I’m lonely.
Username checks out
If you’re getting coding advice, you might be on the wrong forums, which can explain the snark.
You don’t need to do code to use Linux. You can use Bash if you want, but it’s not a necessityToo many people expect you to know and understand gnu-utils and all the common config file, filesystem and folder structure paradigms though. Which is the problem.
The problem is that Linux nerds, myself included, are too deep in the knowledge to even think of sth. You might not know. And my way to learn the basics of Linux was breaking 3 installations and running random scripts from stack overflow without really knowing what they do.
I don’t want this the way for new people to learn Linux. There must be a better way. But I don’t know which one. People who think you can’t ask questions because your basics are missing should shut the fuck up and go to 4chan or so.
None of that is code.
It’s possible that when you ask for help you don’t even use the words correctly, like you demonstrated here, so you expect people to help you without doing a bare minimum of even understanding the terms. If this is true, it’s on you.
So many times I saw people comming hot, asking for help, and when given a command to run, getting angry that it’s some words they don’t understand, and asking for a different solution, one that doesn’t require commands.
I don’t know, for example, what problem you had that required you to “understand filesystem” whatever you mean by that, and if so, what solution to it you expected.You’re the only one rambling about coding right now, Apocalypteroid just used the word once; given he’s a self-described novice it’s safe to assume the word was used in a generalizing manner to describe any kind of bash, command line magic or config file syntax (as little as there is, there still is more or less basic syntax you have to adhere to. Enthusiasts might not even realize this anymore). Your comments do make a good example of the communication problem between novices and Linux/IT enthusiasts though. Your expectation towards people who aren’t into a topic to use perfect terminology in their questions is both naive and inconsiderate. It’s no wonder people got angry with you.
To answer your last question regarding “understand filesystem (paradigms)”: Coming from Windows people rarely, if ever, had to learn about any kind of filesystem; if they had to most people just right-clicked and formatted a disk. While saying that “ext4 is standard” would be rather straight-forward, more and more distros come with btrfs. Additionally it’s important to know about exfat to not let them run into awful situations with incompatible USB sticks and such. Of course this can and should be shown using their distro’s native Disk Utility, i.e. Gnome Disks, KDE Partition Manager or whatever comes with or at a minimum a common tool like GParted so they can safely interact with their own devices.
You can use Bash if you want, but it’s not a necessity
I would argue and say at minimum you should be comfortable with Bash and the file system , otherwise if you spend a year running Linux and encounter some obscure error you’ll be totally clueless troubleshooting wise and might end up breaking something else.
I’ll take it just one miniscule, slight iota further and say they should all go fuck themselves.
But that’s just what I think.
“why don’t you just”
╭∩╮（︶︿︶）╭∩╮
It is always amazing how so many of them can’t help but prove op right any time this comes up.
Copypasting a term command vs. 20 pages of “click here, now click there”. Which is more efficient?
The one enabling people to understand and use their devices on their own. Once you can use a mouse or touchpad, you can navigate the UI. Good UI/UX conveys function. Checkboxes insert the correct configuration in the background without possibly hazardous typos.
The CLI does nothing of this for the user, to understand it users have to invest tens, if not hundreds of hours before they get a hang of all essential commands, paradigms and tools to help themselves. They have to become IT intermediates just to use their computers.
By providing a single CLI command (which, in the worst case, gets copied by a third user on an incompatible system configuration breaking everything) instead of pointing at the GUI tools most user-friendly distros already provide you do, in many cases, a disservice to the average user who just wants their problem to be fixed. They will not be able to help themselves next time for a similar issue.
The one enabling people to understand and use their devices on their own.
CLI it is.
Back in the day, I learned how to network winxp machines together, without a router, and without being able access the internet to find instructions, all because everything I needed to know about any given setting was in the gui where I could manipulate that setting. I had lan parties featuring dozens of pcs, all manually configured. Was this the correct way to do things? Fuck no, but it worked. I was able to make it work because I could see everything I needed to as I was doing it.
None of the above would have been possible if CLI was the only option.
I find it absolutely baffling how an equal amount of people voting on this comment seem to honestly believe that it would’ve been a realistic option for the majority of people (or even everyone) to get one of those Linux books and read hundreds of sites to fully understand everything necessary to manually setup a LAN party in a reasonable time. On 4 to 16 computers. Are all gamers expected to also be interested in IT enough to read such books? Are they supposed to magically know the existence of manpages? Of course not, 90% of private LANs in the early 2000’s would’ve simply not happened without easily navigable GUIs. At least not with computers.
The ignorance by so many in the Linux community regarding GUI is both baffling and infuriating.
I imagine a perfect world in which full guis exist for every setting, and in the tooltips for those settings you can find an explanation of the terminal command to also do the thing. In this way, the gui is the manual for the command line.
To quote Wonderbot: “I don’t need tutorials, I need verbose tooltips.”
The one enabling people to understand and use their devices on their own.
If you’re using a UI, and you have a question about something or don’t understand what you’re doing, isn’t that a sign that either the UI you’re using is insufficient, or your own knowledge is lacking?
Good UI/UX conveys function.
Exactly. By itself, a good UI should “enable people to understand and use their device on their own”. If you’re a UI user and you can’t figure something out on your own, maybe you need to use the terminal to accomplish whatever you’re trying to do.
I also think navigating is easy, doesn’t mean anyone asking for initial help using a GPS app to get on track should from now on use a book with relative directions explained in text.
You missed my point so bad that I’m unsure if it’s worth trying to re-explain myself
I was answering your last point. I didn’t react to the first one because implying the big Linux DEs of user-friendly distros (usually Cinnamon, KDE or Gnome) were bad is just utter nonsense. Incomplete at times in regards to very specialised administrative tasks, sure. But the features and menus that exist are generally well made.
implying the big Linux DEs of user-friendly distros (usually Cinnamon, KDE or Gnome) were bad is just utter nonsense
Where did I imply that?
Incomplete at times in regards to very specialised administrative tasks, sure.
Right, that’s all I was saying.
Lol stop putting words in my mouth
Why does it have to be one or the other?
I, as someone who spends so much time in the terminal that I literally have a dedicated key to open it, would prefer a single CLI command. My grandma, who thinks the monitor is the entire computer, would do better with the “inefficient” GUI option
There can be more than one correct way to do something
Definitely the command. CLI commands are simple and portable. Asking the user what DE they are using for an extra round trip and then making a description of the pointy-clicky-ceremony has way to much friction.
GUIs are just terminal wrappers. Idk what to tell you, man
“easier solutions”
No: pet solutions. Don’t let false consensus dictate the wrong labels.
Here is some :- :() :;: Please don’t try this at home.
I suppose I can try this at root.
Do it
It shouldn’t do anything on a properly configured system (so most systems are screwed)
I run into the issue that after using Linux for so long, I forget that the basics of using the system aren’t just common knowledge. Telling someone to cat a file sounds like gibberish to most people and that’s easy to forget.
There are also a lot of people out there who want to be hand held through every little thing which is the worst way to learn anything. A calm sea never made a skilled sailor, some stuff you gotta just figure out on your own.
I need Emacs, a terminal emulator and a web browser to be productive, but basically nothing else. (Give me my tiling window manager, with a config I haven’t bothered to update the past few years for an extra 3% bump in efficiency.)
It’s weird, I know how all the components in a modern desktop environment work and fit together but I don’t want to care anymore. I want someone to hold my hand, manage my system and make all the thinking go away, right up until I ssh out from my desktop and out into a fleet of servers and start spewing out esoteric commands and orchestration.
My dream is to have someone manage my desktop for me, so I don’t even have to think about it.
Gnome and KDE, what’s the 3rd logo
Cinnamon (Mint’s DE) I think
Yea I’m wondering that too
Cinnamon, most commonly known from Mint. There are also Fedora and Ubuntu spins for it.
Been using Linux for 10 years and this is the first time I’ve seen the cinnamon logo lol
Just give me your rdp access. I promise I will not abuse it.
You don’t need too much GUI, it’s usually just bloat. A lot of race cars have their interior ripped out for less weight, I consider using the terminal as much as possible the same vein. The terminal also acts as a gatekeeping mechanism in Linux, I don’t want normies ruining the Linux ecosystem, all the problems of tech blamed on unmanaged capitalism by Ed Zitron and Cory Doctorow are actually all the result of woke DEI Code of Conducts, go watch Brian Lunduke to learn more.
Yes, it’s going to be uncomfortable for a few months, maybe even a few years. You might get called a lot of bad words along the way, maybe even get doxxed and harassed IRL, but it’s just normal human behavior. Nowadays I’m writing my Python and Javascript code on Arch Linux using neovim, on a 65% artisan mechanical keyboard, and I’ve set my own custom shortcuts for everything. In my free time, I harass Rust, Swift, Go, D, etc. developers, and call them weak and pathetic for wanting to do system development using a language with both memory safety and without janky design that made sense on an old mainframe with limited memory. You either use C/C++, maybe assembly, for system development, or a bloated scripting language for memory safety on top of a C/C++ system!
Nowadays I’m writing my Python and Javascript code on Arch Linux using neovim, on a 65% artisan mechanical keyboard, and I’ve set my own custom shortcuts for everything.
Pfft, normie. I use Emacs.
Is this a wonderwall reference?
I said maybe (I said maybe) Terminal gonna be the one that saves me (That saves me)
And after aaaaaall you’re my terminaaaaaaal
How many special people change
How many lives are living strange
them : Be more descriptive!!
You: more descriptive
them: pasting “be more descriptive” in every other post
