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by Magniquick 5 days ago
That's what KDE (and gnome, to a lesser extent) have been trying to do for a long while.

The fundamental issue is that a GUI is a static abstraction over a CLI that allows for millions of potential combinations. You can only expose so many options in a menu before the interface becomes completely unusable.

To expand on your analogy, it’s like running a restaurant that only uses automated vending machines to serve food. It works perfectly fine if someone just wants toasted bread. But the moment a customer asks for more than toasted bread, you're toasted.

Imho, the best bet for the future is a bunch of pre loaded llm skills and clis an agent can work with: getting the chef to use pre-approved hardware, sorta, that can cook up anything that is needed.

1 comments

> The fundamental issue is that a GUI is a static abstraction over a CLI that allows for millions of potential combinations. You can only expose so many options in a menu before the interface becomes completely unusable.

But is that an issue? Macs have had this solved for almost half a century: You expose things in the GUI that normal people need, not everything. For hackers, they can still go to the command line to hack.

> > The fundamental issue is that a GUI is a static abstraction over a CLI that allows for millions of potential combinations. You can only expose so many options in a menu before the interface becomes completely unusable. > > But is that an issue? Macs have had this solved for almost half a century: You expose things in the GUI that normal people need, not everything. For hackers, they can still go to the command line to hack.

Good point. I'd say, Linux has inherent complexity across multiple dimensions (less hardware integration, multiple stacks (is it running systemd-networkd ? Or maybe dns

macOS also exposes more advanced things through the GUI but not by default. Its largely undiscoverable, but holding option before clicking something generally offers more options (e.g., hold option and click wifi in the menu bar to get all the detailed connection information).

I like that method, keeps the default GUI clean but still offers GUI options for most things if you know where to look.