I have used Arch for >13 years (btw) and use the terminal every single session. I also work with Linux servers daily, so I tried the other families with DEs (Debian/Ubuntu, RHEL/CentOS/AlmaLinux/Fedora).
I’m comfortable (and prefer) doing everything with CLI tools. For me, it’s a bit difficult to convert my Windows friends, as they all see me as some kind of hackerman.
What’s the landscape like nowadays, in terms of terminal requirements?
Bonus question: Which distribution is the most user-friendly while still updated packages? Does anything provide a similar experience to Arch’s amazing AUR?
The allergy to CLI is always strange to me. Computers didn’t always have mice, or GUIs, and people had to learn them when they came around. It’s like saying “I want to ride a bike but I don’t want to learn how.” After a certain point, I don’t really know what to say to something like that. You have to learn how to do anything that is new to you. That doesn’t make it bad, or even necessarily difficult…but anything you don’t know will be unfamiliar, and one just has to be OK with that for a while until it’s not anymore. I think the usability of most mainstream distros is right where it should be. GNOME and KDE have done a very good job of it (edit: barring some very important accessibility concerns, which the GNOME and KDE teams have both shown to be open to learning from and improving on).
I get it. Every single other application a GUI user has used in their life: Ctrl-C = copy, and Ctrl-Z = undo. Open the terminal, and now Ctrl-C is an interupt, and Ctrl-Z is like a pause. Every terminal emulator has the option to change these keymappings. But doing that has a bunch of consequences once you start running more than basic file operations and nano. I think this is usually the first big hurdle to get over. It’s muscle memory that needs to be suppressed.
And then there’s the documentation aspect. With a GUI, you can visually look around to see what can be done in a program. With the CLI, there’s options that you just kinda have to know. There’s -h or --help, then there’s the man pages. But even just navigating the man pages brings up the previous problem of unfamiliar/unintuitive keybindings. so you could also install tldr for faster help, but the vast majority of the time, it’ll be faster to just search online.
All that being said, I prefer the CLI for pretty much everything, and think it would be interesting if there was a sort of pedagogical distro to teach the command line. Imagine a file browser that displays the underlying utilities/commands being used. Like, when you open your home folder maybe there’s a line showing ‘ls -al /home/me | grep [whatever params to get the info being displayed]’. Or, when you go into the settings, it shows you the specific text files being edited for each option. Something that just exposes the inner workings a little more so that people can learn what they’re actually doing as they’re using the GUI
Different user types have different capabilities. Some think in terms of text. Others are more visual. Neither is wrong. Just like a left handed person is not wrong. Good usability is about adapting the software to the person. Not the person to the software. For a lot of what I do there is no text command. And for many, the CLI is an unfamiliar interface. So it’s a productivity disadvantage to switch over to a CLI just for a single command when the rest of the time you are in a GUI.