The cost is the time you will spend learning how to use it and debug issues (mostly copying and pasting strange commands from strangers on old forum posts)
What shits me with Linux commands is they don’t make sense.
Copy, diskpart, dir and so on make sense.
But Linux. Bah.
Cp, lsblk (sudo fdisk -l) and ls.
I know it’s an a old dog thing but having used dos and windows command line for over 50 years it just makes me so frustrated to see Linux commands and their switches, syntax and parameters so obtusely obscure, purposeful, unnecessarily filled with complex jargon.
I write sql and python so I’m not unused to this sort of world but everytime I use Linux I find the command line, the supposedly masterful feature of the OS, just painfully, unnecessarily, poorly designed.
copying and pasting strange commands from strangers on old forum posts)
Yes exactly the only way to obtain the help is via weird forums where you waste hours reading posts from people trying to do basic shit. Half the time it’s for the wrong distro, version or whatever bullshit problem you’ve got.
Like godforbid you want to mount a drive that won’t mount in the GUI version of whatever kernal distro ver you end up getting.
You end up writing ridiculously long commands to do shit I can do in a handful of words that make sense in plain English.
Just shits me that MS is hellbent on enshitificating windows, forcing us to find alt.
I mean, diskpart and dir don’t make especially any more sense than lsblk/parted and ls. A fair point can be made for ‘copy’ being more intuitive, but ‘diskpart’ means you had to learn what disks and partitioning were, and lsblk means you need to learn what ‘block’ devices rae, and of course ‘parted’ references partitions. ‘dir’ means you wanted to ‘show the directory’ which means you had to learn of it as a directory, but then learn that the shortname of directory is the way to see the contents of a directory. ls means you learned you want to ‘list’ contents and that unix had this laziness of just the first and third letters of a word. Both involve learning, neither is ‘intuitive’.
You end up writing ridiculously long commands
I assume this is the likes of dbus-send and crap, and I agree with you if that’s the case. Dbus is a complication I could do without and have to confess that powershell cmdlets generally do a better job of instrumenting the system than a system that increasingly has no specific help and only long dbus-send commands to tackle certain things. dconf has issues too, but I think does a better job than the Windows registry at analagous function.
I understand your issue with the terminal. I think that it could be fixed with Oh-my-zsh for a personal computer. I have mine setup so I don’t have to remember the entire command, just the first letter and it shows me all matches. I was proficient with both batch and powershell, but bash scripting is even easier.
Yeah, I had given up Linux for over a decade, but Windows 11 has brought it back out… And tbh I like it better as an adult. Now I run Windows in a docker container only.
This is why I appreciate immutable distros so much. Sure, you can’t really do super sick stuff by tinkering with system files or modify some system components to make it your dream system, but the average user really doesn’t need that. In most use cases, the flatpak version of a software will just run fine, sometimes even better than the standalone version due to certain outdated dependencies being hard to acquire/install that the Flatpak just integrates. Sure, Flatpak also has issues, but for the most part it works for the end user.
The cost is the time you will spend learning how to use it and debug issues (mostly copying and pasting strange commands from strangers on old forum posts)
What shits me with Linux commands is they don’t make sense.
Copy, diskpart, dir and so on make sense.
But Linux. Bah.
Cp, lsblk (sudo fdisk -l) and ls.
I know it’s an a old dog thing but having used dos and windows command line for over 50 years it just makes me so frustrated to see Linux commands and their switches, syntax and parameters so obtusely obscure, purposeful, unnecessarily filled with complex jargon.
I write sql and python so I’m not unused to this sort of world but everytime I use Linux I find the command line, the supposedly masterful feature of the OS, just painfully, unnecessarily, poorly designed.
Yes exactly the only way to obtain the help is via weird forums where you waste hours reading posts from people trying to do basic shit. Half the time it’s for the wrong distro, version or whatever bullshit problem you’ve got.
Like godforbid you want to mount a drive that won’t mount in the GUI version of whatever kernal distro ver you end up getting.
You end up writing ridiculously long commands to do shit I can do in a handful of words that make sense in plain English.
Just shits me that MS is hellbent on enshitificating windows, forcing us to find alt.
What choice do we have anymore
I mean, diskpart and dir don’t make especially any more sense than lsblk/parted and ls. A fair point can be made for ‘copy’ being more intuitive, but ‘diskpart’ means you had to learn what disks and partitioning were, and lsblk means you need to learn what ‘block’ devices rae, and of course ‘parted’ references partitions. ‘dir’ means you wanted to ‘show the directory’ which means you had to learn of it as a directory, but then learn that the shortname of directory is the way to see the contents of a directory. ls means you learned you want to ‘list’ contents and that unix had this laziness of just the first and third letters of a word. Both involve learning, neither is ‘intuitive’.
I assume this is the likes of dbus-send and crap, and I agree with you if that’s the case. Dbus is a complication I could do without and have to confess that powershell cmdlets generally do a better job of instrumenting the system than a system that increasingly has no specific help and only long dbus-send commands to tackle certain things. dconf has issues too, but I think does a better job than the Windows registry at analagous function.
I’m the same, but with windows.
People just don’t like changing their ways.
Also you’ll find out that linux is mostly much more logical than windows ever was.
I understand your issue with the terminal. I think that it could be fixed with Oh-my-zsh for a personal computer. I have mine setup so I don’t have to remember the entire command, just the first letter and it shows me all matches. I was proficient with both batch and powershell, but bash scripting is even easier.
Yeah, I had given up Linux for over a decade, but Windows 11 has brought it back out… And tbh I like it better as an adult. Now I run Windows in a docker container only.
I haven’t actually needed to do much of that. Very little actually. And when I did it was just a trivial copy-paste
Or using LLMs. For common problems they give good answers. But for niche problems one should double check what the proposed commands actually do.
You just summarised the pain I have with troubleshooting Linux. As a pleb, I am happy with Bazzite being user friendly.
This is why I appreciate immutable distros so much. Sure, you can’t really do super sick stuff by tinkering with system files or modify some system components to make it your dream system, but the average user really doesn’t need that. In most use cases, the flatpak version of a software will just run fine, sometimes even better than the standalone version due to certain outdated dependencies being hard to acquire/install that the Flatpak just integrates. Sure, Flatpak also has issues, but for the most part it works for the end user.