So… I’m definitely cheering up for the lady in red.
Why? Am I an elitist asshole doing his best to sound smart?
Well yes, definitely BUT I also appreciate the power of the command line. The CLI isn’t “cool” because of the cryptic command, no the CLI is cool because :
- ls (list files)
- ls *.txt (list all files ending with the .txt extension)
- ls *.txt | wc -l (count how of them are)
- etc
and the “etc” is the FUNDAMENTAL part! Namely that no matter how smart the GUI developer is, they can’t predict how it is going to be used when done with OTHER tools. That’s the true power of the CLI. So yes if you stick to a single command, the CLI is unnecessarily cryptic but as soon as you start to combine commands, nothing comes close to it.




FWIW I do have 2 Linux phones and… they work. The problem IMHO is that non-software companies believe THEY can lock or profit their customers via an “app”. If they only provided a Web page instead rather than a mandatory mobile application then it wouldn’t matter so much.
So, despite have working Linux phones (albeit far from perfect) I’m still relying on a deGoogled Android phone so that I can run mobile “apps” for only a couple of, quite important to me, services.
To summarize, I don’t think it’s the OS themselves that fuel lock-in but rather apps that require those locked down OSes.