 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel today. I'm going to be talking about two ease versus GUIs now If you don't know what these are You're probably new to Linux and chances are you probably have already used a GUI it stands for graphical user interface and Tooie is just a terminal user interface that basically what we're talking about is graphical applications like I don't know firefox Audacity or OBS or something and terminal user interface applications like NC spot or Ranger or Any number of other terminal based applications that are fairly popular there seems to be a bit of a debate amongst the older Linux crowd over which one of these is better and personally, I'm of the opinion that really you just use what's your most comfortable with and a Browser because I mean really I don't think very many people actually browse the internet in the browser or in the terminal excuse me It's just something I don't think most people do there's nothing wrong if you do do it I've tried but it's not a Great experience not with the way the web has been built these days so Today I just thought I would go through and highlight some of the reasons why each of these is good and Why maybe each of these is you know, not so good. So that's what I'm going to do today So let's start off with terminal user interfaces. I'm just gonna call them to ease from here on out because Terminal user interfaces is a you know a pretty big mouthful and I like to stumble over my words quite a lot So it's just gonna be easier if I use the acronym So first I'm just gonna say this if you are if your workflow is focused on the keyboard And you try to use the mouse as little as possible. So say for example, if you're a tiling window manager user Chances are the terminal will actually be better for your workflow because everything that you do in the terminal or at least Most of the things you do in the terminal are based on a keyboard centric workflow You move around in them using the keyboard you move around in NC spot or Ranger Or you know any commands in the command line Using the keyboard. You don't have to use your mouse. So if you're focused on keyboard centric workflows The terminal is the best place for you to do your work or as much as your work as possible. I should say that The next thing is it's great on low-end machines or older machines without a ton of resources Most to ease now I'm there are some exceptions, of course Most two e-app applications tend to take up less memory than a GUI application because you don't have all the added extraneous things on top of The function of the application that you have to have in order to display the interface So the Chrome and Firefox takes up, you know more Resources than something like cute browser has because it has no Chrome I mean obviously cute browser is not a terminal application about it's just a kind of a comparison So the next thing is kind of similar when you're using primarily two ease. There's less extraneous things on your system So the more terminal applications you use the less electron apps you have So for example, if you choose to use NC spot versus Spotify, you'd have fewer packages on your machine because NC spot uses incurses and I think rust I'm not actually sure it uses different packages than what Spotify doesn't it doesn't contain extraneous stuff The Spotify requires in order to actually work, which is like electron and all that kind of stuff The next one is not tangible in any means by any means If you use the terminal you get a little bit of nerd cred because it makes you look like you're a nerd And it makes you look like you're super smart You always make sure you look like you're kind of productive because if you're using a terminal, obviously you're doing work I mean, that's just the way it is. Everybody knows that So you get some nerd cred the last one I'm gonna talk about is usually you have more control in a tui than you do in a gooey over your colors and the layout and The look and feel of it because often times you it inherits the look and feel of your terminal in terms of colors and stuff like that and fonts of course Whereas in gooey's most often you're just stuck with whatever the designer or the developer shows Now obviously that's not 100% true across the board a lot of gooey applications allow you to customize things or allow you to theme them via G2k things or G or cute themes or whatever So I mean, it's not always the case, but sometimes it's the case So let's go ahead and move to gooey's now Graphically user interfaces are Graphical that means they have Buttons and they have things that you have to interact with via, you know, your mouse or something usually I mean sometimes Gooey's can have like keyboard shortcuts and stuff like that. In fact, probably most do have most Gooey's have some form of keyboard shortcuts and stuff built in It's at least the more complicated ones I guess so You can use your keyboard, but it's meant to be used with a mouse. That's why the buttons are big It's why buttons exist in the first place. It's you know You can see usually what the app is doing. So Gooey's are better if you're more of a mouse kind of person so if you're more your if your workflow is more suited towards using both a keyboard and a mouse Which I think most people's workflows are Because most people come from Windows or Macintosh So they've been using keyboards and mice together their entire computing careers. So usually this is the way People are more comfortable, you know in computing with both devices at the same time so I've put this down there Gooey's are better if you're a more visual learner or a thinker if you if you do better work and are more efficient when you're interacting with like Windows and I use like Windows like in terms of the actual like application Gooey's can be more comforting and more efficient for you because that's just what you're used to or if that's more How you learn or how you Do your work It takes a little bit of mental Work a little bit of mental I don't know fortitude I guess to go through and translate your workflow from the traditional Mac windows Style stuff into actually being able to do things that you would normally have done in a gooey into a tui and Not everybody is either capable of doing that or willing to do it So the next one is gooey apps tend to work better with other apps and my example for this one is file managers Now if you want to drag a file from a from someplace to like say firefox You're almost universally going to be doing that from a visual file manager to you know firefox You can do it with a Terminal file manager, but it's hard. You have to configure it in order to do it and it's not Great, it's kind of buggy. So Usually gooey's tend to work better with each other whereas Terminal applications really do tend to be sandbox. They do their one thing and they do their one thing well And that's really all they do. They don't usually interact with other things now Obviously again, there are exceptions because there's you know demons and all that kind of stuff that you interact with in the terminal That you run in the background and also interact with you know Different applications. So like a good example is MPD and NC MP CPP or whatever the hell it's called Those things rely on each other in order to actually work and those they obviously interact in order to do so The next one is a lot of the time you have to put up with tons of extra libraries in gooey's like electron and stuff, but That's not always necessarily a bad thing because it allows you to have actually it allows you to actually Have those applications on your computer in the first place. So like before We had electron Linux didn't have Spotify. They didn't have slack. They didn't have Microsoft Teams Those things are all reliant on Electron and just because it adds, you know an extra layer onto your computer and is Slow and takes a pre-source. This doesn't mean it's a bad thing because it actually gives you access to those things So I have this down here as well oftentimes gooey apps are easier to learn Simply because most people Are have been trained to use them. So this is kind of similar to what I was saying earlier Most people come from Mac and Windows. So they've been trained from probably elementary school. Maybe even earlier to use Graphical applications. I mean most people aren't in elementary school learning how to use the terminal It's just not the way the world works. Everything is graphical these days like I said earlier in order to make the transition from gooey to toey you have to have some kind of Kicked in order to do so you have to have the willingness in order and Eagerness to order to learn how to do it and not everybody does so We've talked a little bit about the downsides. So like in two ways, they don't interact really well with graphical file managers That they're also usually Fairly limited in scope. So I mean it's not always true, but oftentimes two e-applications are more Focused on one thing and one thing. Well, where's gooey's oftentimes gooey applications do many things well or focused on many different applications a Good example is a note-taking app. It's oftentimes has note-taking and graphs and stuff like that or LibreOffice is a gooey application and it has a whole suite of stuff that it does, right? So Whereas with a terminal application. Yeah, we have them and yes It can do a lot of things, but it's really kind of focused on one thing and one thing well Same thing with NC spot or Ranger or those things. They're just single-use applications for Gooey's a bad thing is really the performance hit a lot of the times But even then that's not as big of a deal these days when pretty much everyone has You know eight or 16 gigabytes in there of memory in their computers, but for the most part When you're talking about a gooey you're talking about higher intensive Applications in terms of resources the last thing I want to talk about is documentation because this is important for officially for new users documentation in terms of two e's is usually very very good because The developer isn't going to make the assumption that you know what you're doing when you used the application Obviously again, there are exceptions where the documentation is bad, but for the most part if you're in a new Terminal application and you go to the man page you're going to get quite a bit of information Whereas with gooey's a lot of the times and I'm not saying most times, but sometimes You're going to find that that application documentation is not as good as what it would be if it was a terminal application because They assume you know how to use it So really the documentation for the two types of apps can really differ a lot depending on what type of application you're using And especially the more popular apps locations like that the documentation isn't like always necessarily the greatest thing you'll ever see so Here's my question for you Do you prefer terminal applications or gooey's or are you like me who uses and I'm assuming that I'm I mean, maybe that's a big a big assumption, but I assume that I'm fairly normal on this that I use both so like I Always search for a terminal application when I'm looking for something specific like If I was given the choice between Spotify and NC spot, I'd always choose the terminal application But my workflow is such that I use a ton of graphical applications too. So like I use a desk I use OBS. I have to do this. I have Zim. I obviously use Firefox. I use LibreOffice Even though I'm a Vim user, I don't do my writing in Vim. So I mean, I'd love to do my writing in them But it's not great for writing. I mean, that's just completely beside the point But I'm very mixed in terms of what I use because that's what I'm used to Could I go to an a completely to eBased workflow? Maybe there are word processors that work in Terminals like word grinder. I don't really care for it all that much, but I could do that. I think where I would fall down would be like things like OBS and Audacity and Firefox, I think those would be the three applications where I really couldn't leave them behind Browsing in the terminal is terrible I'm just putting that out there. It's it's my opinion, but I'm pretty sure I'm right Editing audio. I don't even know if it's possible. I'm assuming you could probably use something like fm ffm peg or something to Edit audio of some kind. I don't know I'm just completely pulling that out of my ass. So but it's possible that it, you know, you could do that and Recording video again is possible in the terminal using you know tools but It's not as elegant as it would be it's using OBS and you get a ton of different features for OBS that you can You know tweak and you know do whatever to in order to get a good video recording So plus you obviously you can stream which is not as far as I know You can't stream from like ffm peg or whatever it is to like twitch or something. So I don't know That is me and I would love to know how your workflow Alternates whatever between twoies and guis leave that in the comments below I do enjoy our conversations. Make sure you follow us on twitter at the linuxcast. You can also Enter this conversation on twitter if you'd like you can also follow us on facebook at the linuxcast And you can support us on patreon at patreon.com slash the linuxcast I'd like to thank our current patrons devon marcus marik and camp Thanks for your support. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time