Re:You Don't Need a GUI
by axiolite on Friday April 09, 2021 @12:44AM
(#26746820)
> If I don't remember the `df` command... what do I do apart from searching on the internet?
I'd try "ls /bin" and see if any of the names sounded familiar or possibly relevant. Or "man -k space" which shows "df (1) - report file system disk space usage" on line 24, which isn't a lot of reading.
GUI's aren't always intuitive. Nothing worse than not having the option in your right-click menu because you tried right-clicking in the left "explorer" column, but really needed to open the parent dir then right-click on the folder in the right-hand side. GUIs can be infinitely more difficult/complex.
Back in the Win95 days, I recall a case where someone couldn't figure out how to format a floppy. After struggling for hours, he did a search which found format.exe, and used it. It's hard to discover that you can right-click on the drive to get the option, because there are many things that don't show up there... You can't create partitions or change drive letters in the right-click menu there, for example, but how would you know? You've got to learn the options/capabilities for your system, whether its GUI or CLI.
What a GUI really has going for it, is that it offers a limited set of options, greatly simplifying the exploration. Something like Norton Commander, DOSBox or other limited/restricted shell (which shows only the most common commands) has similar discoverability benefits without the graphics, and still with those cli benefits available to you.
I'd try "ls /bin" and see if any of the names sounded familiar or possibly relevant. Or "man -k space" which shows "df (1) - report file system disk space usage" on line 24, which isn't a lot of reading.
GUI's aren't always intuitive. Nothing worse than not having the option in your right-click menu because you tried right-clicking in the left "explorer" column, but really needed to open the parent dir then right-click on the folder in the right-hand side. GUIs can be infinitely more difficult/complex.
Back in the Win95 days, I recall a case where someone couldn't figure out how to format a floppy. After struggling for hours, he did a search which found format.exe, and used it. It's hard to discover that you can right-click on the drive to get the option, because there are many things that don't show up there... You can't create partitions or change drive letters in the right-click menu there, for example, but how would you know? You've got to learn the options/capabilities for your system, whether its GUI or CLI.
What a GUI really has going for it, is that it offers a limited set of options, greatly simplifying the exploration. Something like Norton Commander, DOSBox or other limited/restricted shell (which shows only the most common commands) has similar discoverability benefits without the graphics, and still with those cli benefits available to you.