Ramblings and questions regarding Fedora, but stemming from gnome-software and desktop environments

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 10:47 PM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net> wrote:
>
> Am 02.01.2015 um 21:05 schrieb Miloslav Trmač:
>>
>> Here, GUIs _as a category_ (not necessarily the GUIs we are currently
>> providing) should always be better than CLIs _as a category_ simply because
>> the GUI can in the worst case just copy the CLI layout and behavior so it
>> will not be worse than a CLI; and then there are all the graphics and mouse
>> interactions and shadows and animation that a GUI can do but a CLI can’t.
>
>
> no it can't
>
> a gui for "grep file | grep -v x | grep -y | sort | uniq | awk... > newfile"
> is impossible because you *never* can build a GUI that is the same way
> flexiable and still useable

That *particular* widget has been done, with various search and regexp
widgets. But they tend to be done quite badly, with each deverloper
going "ooohhh, shiny!!!" and concentrating on feature addition and
showing off all the cool widgets. Kind of like Gnome, actually.

There's an old, fascinating essay about this by Eric Raymond, called
"The L:uxury of Ignorance", over 10 years ago.  Gnome tools tend to
violate most of the guidelines, and the software installation tool
violates these in particular:

    11. What does my software look like to a non-technical user who
has never seen it before?

And from the guidelines Eric included from a letter writer's submission:

    * Can you gracefully and easily duplicate your tools and
configuration for a similar installation?
    * Are there settings you can do from the command line or
hand-editing config files that cannot be done from the GUI?

In case you can't guess, those are postscript guidelines were written by me

> but you can't and won't use the GUI the same way on remote machines over
> slow lines as you can use a CLI and hence smart, short and repeatable tasks
> are done in shell-scripts because a "ssh user at host /usr/local/bin/task.sh"
> is done before you remote GUI even starts

The GUI's can be handy, especially because yum text output becaumes
difficult to script unnecessary header information and the erratic
newlines for long package names.