Re:Windows 10 is bringing ads to File Explorer – how to turn...
by AnthonyMouse on Saturday March 18, 2017 @10:39PM
(#13904844)
> GUI are infinitely valuable in that case. Windows allows to do quite sophisticated stuff all the way with a UI. You can always observe the state of the system, know what can be done from there, etc.
People from Windows commonly have this impression because in Windows everything is either a GUI or the registry, and nobody wants to touch the registry without a long pole and a hazmat suit but you occasionally have to anyway. So you quickly build the intuition that anything without a GUI is painful and wrong, which isn't the case on other operating systems.
Most configuration files on Unix-like systems have manual pages that list what options you can set and what they do. For example the man page for logrotate.conf says you can add the line "mail address" to have it email the oldest log to address before deleting it. It's no more difficult to read the man page and find the option you want than look through seven pages of GUI settings to find it, and often easier because man pages are searchable. With the further advantage of actually describing what the option does rather than just giving you a GUI text box with the word "mail" next to it and letting you guess whether you're supposed to type an email address or a filename to mail or something else.
> like creating a VM.
There is a GUI program called virt-manager to do this on Linux. Most desktop Linux distributions have GUI programs to do a lot of things like that, people just don't use them as often because the GUI-alternative on Unix-like systems is actually reasonable. Although you picked a good example in the sense that creating a VM directly using qemu-kvm is harder than it probably ought to be.
People from Windows commonly have this impression because in Windows everything is either a GUI or the registry, and nobody wants to touch the registry without a long pole and a hazmat suit but you occasionally have to anyway. So you quickly build the intuition that anything without a GUI is painful and wrong, which isn't the case on other operating systems.
Most configuration files on Unix-like systems have manual pages that list what options you can set and what they do. For example the man page for logrotate.conf says you can add the line "mail address" to have it email the oldest log to address before deleting it. It's no more difficult to read the man page and find the option you want than look through seven pages of GUI settings to find it, and often easier because man pages are searchable. With the further advantage of actually describing what the option does rather than just giving you a GUI text box with the word "mail" next to it and letting you guess whether you're supposed to type an email address or a filename to mail or something else.
> like creating a VM.
There is a GUI program called virt-manager to do this on Linux. Most desktop Linux distributions have GUI programs to do a lot of things like that, people just don't use them as often because the GUI-alternative on Unix-like systems is actually reasonable. Although you picked a good example in the sense that creating a VM directly using qemu-kvm is harder than it probably ought to be.