water cooler :: cli & gui
The subject came up on irc tonight, and being a relatively slow typist I figured i'd make a post here rather than try to express all my thoughts among the various responses of others....plus it may provide a place for others to contribute who may not be active at #damnsmalllinux
Linux gives us an opportunity which is not so prevalent in windows and mac....this is the opportunity to choose between using a text-based or graphical interface for practically any task. Some people may prefer commandline interface (cli), and others may want graphical user interface (gui) for everything they do. Personally I like to mix it up. It's my opinion that some tasks are made for a graphical interface, while others perform just as well or better with the less-demanding text interface, and i was interested in hearing the opinions of others about this.
For myself there are some things I just am not comfortable doing without gui...these things include interactive editing of audio and graphics files (non-interactive stuff such as format conversion is good with cli), web browsing, and gaming.
For practically anything else i think cli is often a faster, leaner, and simpler solution....for things like email, irc, multimedia, and text editing.
There is also what i consider an intermediate interface, such as ncurses or dialog, which gives you just enough interaction to make some tasks easy without having to remember extensive commandline options and without having the overhead of a gui. I use this for things like ripping CDs and file management
original here.