i can remember places i've been to (or only seen in photos) decades ago, and navigate them successfully. i can describe images i saw once when i was a kid. but i have literally no 'verbal memory', i can't remember movie lines, or lyrics to any of my favorite songs, and when it comes to programming, and terminal commands? well. i've been using linux distros for almost 20 years and still, daily, look up things like "linux how to find files with extension". it is NOT a good operating system for me
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@sstendahl i agree that just like on windows or mac OS, the CLI is often a very poor experience, but unlike on those systems, it is exceedingly common to find that the most well-documented, most reliable, most well-supported, or perhaps even the *only* supported way of doing something is via a CLI. this is a linux-specific problem that the others do not suffer from to the same degree. there's no theoretical reason why linux specifically should be bad in this way, but in practical use, it is
@sstendahl for example, in the last year or so, i've had maybe five situations across 2-3 different distros where the GUI app that shipped with the distro which was supposed to help me configure something (display, sound, bluetooth) was either buggy, or else incapable of performing certain functionality, that the only way to set a sound setting, connect a specific game controller, or configure an external display, was via CLI, so the GUI app now shows wrong data since i was going behind its back
@sstendahl this makes me distrust the various distros' GUI apps enormously: they're poorly-tested, leaky abstractions over underlying subsystem APIs, and are probably just running the same commands i could be running myself, so i tend to prefer the CLI workflows since at least i can trust they will work to some extent. but then, of course, i can't ever remember what the CLI tools are named, or how to use them. just searching for a file can take me 15 minutes of googling. it's awful
@jk This is not a solution to a dire UI problem, but here's my mitigation for not being able to remember terminal commands:
I use `tldr` to see quick examples, and if I'm lucky the thing I'm trying to do is common and the answer is right there: https://tldr.sh/
For an LLM-free fork attempt (sigh), see https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/ethical-tldr-client
Currently I use the tealdeer client, which has an additional feature, local tldr pages so you can store tips for yourself on your machine: https://docs.tealdeer.org/stable/usage_custom_pages.html
i've found that other people seem to be able to just encode structured data in their brain, verbatim, and reproduce it. i can only produce a paraphrased version, with the same meaning and stylistic features, a plausible guess. as a kid, i used to get in trouble for 'improvising' when playing piano, but the only way i can learn is an improvisation that converges toward the real thing. if the syntax has a strict "wrong until perfect" step function (not differentiable?) i can't learn at all
@jk further vindication for Eagle Mode
@jk That seems like a problem with CLI, not with the operating system by itself.
Take the example in question, finding a file with a certain extension in my file manager is literally just typing e.g. .png. Or if you're more traditionally inclined: ctrl+f and then .png.
Which I assume is the same on Windows and MacOS, I don't use any of those systems. It's just that I never really get the criticism that the CLI is a poor experience for most people, when this is true for every system.