What is the point of advances if not to provide greater end-user utility, functionality, ease of use, etc?
Again: changes in GUI demonstrably do not deliver that.
And good GUIs don't change.
Because in large part of the institutional cost of breaking shell scripts, TUIs don't change often (and tools violating this principle are quickly and sharply deprecated and/or replaced with those that don't). Which means that as a user (or administrator or programmer), the investment you put into using console tools tends to have an exceedingly long half life.
Mind: I'd given this deliberate and conscious thought in the mid-1990s when I was faced with a few possible directions to take my own computing career and use. I'd already seen numerous platforms, notably proprietary and GUI ones, change substantially, or die entirely. Seemed to me that the skill-preserving route would be with Linux or the BSDs. That's proved a good decision and rationale.
Even a "minimal window manager" -- say, twm or vtwm, provides extensive functionality and does not change. There's a hell of a lot to be said for learning a skill once and not having to either replace it with another, or keep obsoleting previously acquired knowledge and habits.
I don't use twm myself, outside occasional testing. One of the best and most skillful programmers I've ever known did use it, and had a highly tricked out configuration, almost completely keyboard driven, that let him fly around his display and workspaces with an amazing faculty. The fact that the windowmanager itself is flyweight and bedrock stable only added to this.
My own preference is WindowMaker, based on the design principles of NextStep (1988), and largely static since the late 1990s. It has capabilities modern WMs and DEs still lack, is extremely high performance, and extraordinarily stable. Graphically, it's nonobtrusive. I might swap it for a tiling WM, but it's served me well for over two decades.
Again: changes in GUI demonstrably do not deliver that.
And good GUIs don't change.
Because in large part of the institutional cost of breaking shell scripts, TUIs don't change often (and tools violating this principle are quickly and sharply deprecated and/or replaced with those that don't). Which means that as a user (or administrator or programmer), the investment you put into using console tools tends to have an exceedingly long half life.
Mind: I'd given this deliberate and conscious thought in the mid-1990s when I was faced with a few possible directions to take my own computing career and use. I'd already seen numerous platforms, notably proprietary and GUI ones, change substantially, or die entirely. Seemed to me that the skill-preserving route would be with Linux or the BSDs. That's proved a good decision and rationale.
Even a "minimal window manager" -- say, twm or vtwm, provides extensive functionality and does not change. There's a hell of a lot to be said for learning a skill once and not having to either replace it with another, or keep obsoleting previously acquired knowledge and habits.
I don't use twm myself, outside occasional testing. One of the best and most skillful programmers I've ever known did use it, and had a highly tricked out configuration, almost completely keyboard driven, that let him fly around his display and workspaces with an amazing faculty. The fact that the windowmanager itself is flyweight and bedrock stable only added to this.
My own preference is WindowMaker, based on the design principles of NextStep (1988), and largely static since the late 1990s. It has capabilities modern WMs and DEs still lack, is extremely high performance, and extraordinarily stable. Graphically, it's nonobtrusive. I might swap it for a tiling WM, but it's served me well for over two decades.