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by jshowa3 2707 days ago
> No idea how you'd run into hardware restrictions;

Hardware can become unsupported when you update the OS. It's happened to me with wireless cards when running FreeBSD on an old EeePC. Even when using xfce, having wpa_supplicant UI was much simpler than remembering and writing a bunch of scripts to set all the crap involved with getting it working. Not everyone uses Debian.

> I don't understand the bit about the console; I haven't met a dev who doesn't find terminals worlds quicker than hunting and pecking in a GUI

Doing a few clicks in a GUI can often result in very complex command executions in the CLI, sometimes across multiple processes. It can be confusing what's going on, especially with redirecting I/O and if you have to do something different, it often requires editing multiple arguments depending on what you want to do.

This is good if you want to script a common task that's repeatable and changes infrequently, but frequent changes in a GUI are much faster and you don't have to worry about copy/paste errors or spelling errors.

And if consoles were so much faster, why does everything evolve into a GUI at some point?

> I was suggesting you should understand what's running on your machine and why

There's hundreds of processes running on the machine at any given time. I would guess that most people don't know or aren't even aware of what and when each process runs at any given state of a machine.

The point is, with a $2k mac (which I would never get by the way), there's easy room for expansion.