The terminal makes many functions easier and faster, it’s more consistent across updates and changes, can be automated with scripts and is much easier for developers to implement into software than a GUI

There’s a learning curve, but there are real practical reasons for someone to use it over GUI

Unless we’re in a simulation, very yes.

Normal people don’t seem to realize this but the reason developers swarmed to Mac OS X over Windows when given a choice for work laptops is that Mac OS X has a built-in POSIX shell.

CLI is and will always be more expressive than a GUI. Some “web apps” have even tacitly acknowledged this by adding terminal emulators to their web apps.

GUI change but the command line lasts forever. The GUI will change from version to version for any program but if you have a script or CLI that will last.

Used the terminal yesterday to search my piracy drive full of movies and shit in a directory structure, find any duplicate files by size/md5, and then it piped the results into my terminal editor of choice where I commented out the lines corresponding to files to delete, then it deleted them for me. Saved a couple hundred gb, and idk how to do it through a gui (besides the insurmountable task of clicking through all those folders.)

Not only that, but turned out I had a bunch of dups in my image folder too that I wasn’t prepared to deal with right then, so in vim I just :/folder and n n n n repeatedly to get to the next relevant entries, made it even faster.

Took maybe 5min (not counting wait time, I ran it, made dinner, and came back and it was ready for me.)

Now, I’m going to peek at that forgotten picture folder in the GUI because I have NO idea what’s going on there and it’ll be helpful for me to get eyes on it instead of reading filenames, so I do use that too, for me it isn’t all or nothing, it’s both, some things are just better CLI and some are actually better GUI, and some can be either depending on how I feel today.

It really depends on what you mean by “the real world”.

The most common use for Linux is on servers. For this scenario, not only does the terminal make sense, but it’s often required as there is no GUI installed.

For Linux on the desktop, the terminal is very much analogous to Windows PowerShell. More casual users can ignore it for most purposes, but may sometimes need it for troubleshooting.

If you are trying to say that you “know” Linux, say for career development, you absolutely need to know the terminal. Nearly all professional roles will require it.

I fixed a family member’s Windows PC once. Stuck in an update boot loop. Had to rebuild the bootloader to fix it. It took ten minutes once I looked up the commands online. He had already taken it to a PC repair shop and they said all they could do was reinstall the operating system. Honestly, these Windows people are like handicapped because they never really interact with their computers. They only interact with a kind of software nanny that keeps them away from the scary stuff for their own good.

I love my terminal.

yes, it’s the most natural and efficient way to do lots of things, and the only way to do some things.

Of course, some of the best single-purpose applications are command-line tools.

FFMPEG or YT-DLP for examples.

Many things are way easier on the command line than they could ever be in a GUI. Especially for processes that need repeatability, e.g converting a whole directory of images in a certain way.

Terminal is nice for a lot of repetitive tasks that would be a chore via GUI.

Even though I’ve been a Linux user for almost 20 years >!(fuck I feel old)!<, I mostly use GUI stuff. Terminal is super neat for doing batch stuff, I’ve even learned how to do some stuff for windows for whenever I inevitably get a call from family to fix their shit. I was pleasantly surprised with winget and I keep a .txt file to batch install common general use apps for them, same as I keep some dotfiles for getting my preferences over on a new PC or install.

I already know what I want the computer to do: why do I have to search with my slow-ass eyes through what someone else decided was the optimum workflow to get the job done?

I try to use terminal versions of programs whenever possible. It’s a lot more pleasant to work on a system remotely in the terminal than using graphical programs, and generally automation is better.

yes, it’s faster. I use neovim and doom emacs so all my navigation is vim style. Therefore I absolutely hate using a mouse now and I find navigating a gui a chore. I mean like unzipping a file is easier, copy and pasting is easier, making a file, directory, whatever it’s just faster via a terminal.

The GUIs are nice, sometimes, especially for visual things. (Selecting an image, color, etc.) The terminal remains extremely powerful though in that it’s much closer to the object, as it were. If you want to, say, change a setting on your personal machine, as long as the GUI designer thought that option should be included in the GUI (because including every possible setting gets very large and unwieldy very quickly) you’re fine. But if you want to adjust that setting on 5, 10, 100 machines, that 30 second trip to the settings app turns into lots of work. If you want to set a setting that the GUI designer didn’t decide to include, you’re stuck. If you want to have an explanation of what you are doing, or what that other setting might do, terminal has man pages. GUI might have tooltips or a crowdsourced explanation.

Absolutely, I use PowerShell loads every single day.

Some things are easier or faster with a GUI and some things are easier or faster with a terminal.