SUSE has had graphical administration tools for literally decades. Somehow people always forget that.

Using Linux Mint, most of what I use I could without terminals if I wish. However, just like with Windows, terminal intervention will be needed sooner or later, usually to figure out why a given program isn’t working.

With Linux Mint you don’t need the terminal 99% of the time. The rest distros are close to 95% of the time. I always suggest Mint to new users.

Depends on what they are doing, but I guess it’s pretty usable without cli interventions - at least for standard apps and unless something gets screwed. Fedora KDE.

Just lie and say they will never need to touch the terminal, then help them out when they need to and eventually they will see its not a big deal

I think Gnome + Flatpak is a great setup for GUI only. Fedora is annoying to set up with nonfree drivers and codecs, otherwise it’s a great choice for this.

(Also, don’t try convert your friends, just wait until they come to you and ask for help installing Linux.)

turns off SteamDeck sorry, what’s a “terminal”? Isn’t it at the airport?

Jokes aside… yes, obviously, it only depends what you actually need to do. I recommend though NOT to be afraid of the terminal. The whole point about using Linux is to do whatever one wants. If that means avoiding the terminal, sure, that’s fine, BUT I believe the goal still is to be able to do MORE and the terminal is itself a very powerful tool. It’s not the terminal itself as much as the composability of the CLI.

So… finding a distribution with all the GUI and TUI and avoiding the CLI until they actually want to use them is great. Avoiding it entirely because no new skill was acquired is a missed opportunity IMHO. I want more Linux users, yes, but I also want BETTER users of any OS. Skilling up users so that we can all do more, together.

Yes.

After god knows how many years now of being on Linux exclusively, I tend to look at the terminal (commands in general) as a convenience more than a necessity. Meaning that in a lot of cases, knowing a command and quickly typing it to start an update (for example) is just faster and easier than pulling up the GUI every time.

I’ve been using Arch for about 3 years now myself and shamefully … I do most things without the terminal.

I still use it for a handful of things of course, I don’t know if there’s a GUI interface for upgrading by I just prefer manually running pacman and inspecting things myself. I write a few small helpful Python scripts here and there to manage my abundant, unrepentant pirating, but otherwise I’m just browsing and gaming.

I really don’t think you can (or should) fully escape it, but it’s been minimized to a point where it’s never been before. Depending on where your friends are at, leaning into the hackerman thing might be useful? Get them set up with Ghostty (running some flashy shaders) and oh-my-zsh so they can feel cool, then teach them how to run pacman -Syu or sudo apt upgrade. Once they’re comfortable with the concept, introduce them to a few little helpful Python or bash scripts or show them how to run htop and kill some processes. I think if you can get people sufficiently interested they’re more eager to pick things up on their own and run with it.

I would say that for 95% of usual tasks I don’t use terminal on Linux Mint Debian Faye 6 (LMDE), most of the software can be installed by double clicking a .deb file you download from the web. Compared to 10 years ago when I tried Linux for the first time (and reverted to Win back then) nowadys it is insanely more convenient to use.

I don’t know why you would want to use linux without the terminal? I mean, you can… but you’ll be limited if you want to do something special or fix a problem. It’s not like you have to know how to code or anything. Often you can copy the commands right into it… It’s really no problem.

Yes it is possible. I never need the terminal. If you are interested, you can usually find a GUI way if you look for one. Some people just don’t look, then tell people there is no GUI for it. Not very helpful for newbies.

For those not into usability, different people work in different ways. Visual workers are not the same as text workers. So for some, CLI has poor usability and productivity. For lots of things I do, there isn’t a CLI anyway.

I use Kubuntu these days. It could be better.

I installed Linux for my mother 15 years ago and she has never used the terminal once.

I update the Ubuntu from time to time and that’s it. Everything works and she can browse the internet, read email and listen to music.

As a Linux Mint user who has only used Linux Mint, Yes, I’ve hardly used the Terminal, I’ve really only used it to download & run specific Software which is really just optional most of the time.

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).