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Couldn't agree more. A good GUI beats a TUI any day. They have the potential to be far more intuitive as well as more aesthetically appealing. Not to mention that for some of us, a GUI gives far greater confidence than a TUI.

For example, I prefer to do package management from the command line, but if I'm editing partitions, I feel the urge to use a GUI like Disk Utility or gparted. For this task, GUIs feel safer for a few reasons. I feel like I can better visualize the changes being made to the drive, and it seems like there are more speed bumps to prevent dumb mistakes.

I do think GUIs can learn a few tricks from TUIs. TUIs are often more responsive and usually provide better keyboard driven workflows.

Ultimately my preference for GUIs probably reflects what I'm used to. To paraphrase Jef Raskin, there are no intuitive UIs, only familiar ones.



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>For example, I prefer to do package management from the command line, but if I'm editing partitions, I feel the urge to use a GUI like Disk Utility or gparted. For this task, GUIs feel safer for a few reasons. I feel like I can better visualize the changes being made to the drive, and it seems like there are more speed bumps to prevent dumb mistakes.

cfdisk, cgdisk.

Maybe you are afraid of parted/fdisk. Then you are right.

But well, fdisk and such are a bit "nightmarish". I had more luck using OpenBSD's disklabel to slice up it's own partitions. And the GPT editor from OpenBSD (I can't remember it's name) was pretty simple to use and preview even on text mode.

You can have both good and bad CLI/TUI's, and even horrendous GUI's, such as the Red Hat installer.


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