this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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I see. Well, while GUI has improved a lot on Linux in recent years, if you still want to know it fully, you'll need to learn the CLI part. CLI on Linux is really powerful and that's why you usually won't find any forum replies related to GUI. That might seem a down part for people who are new to Linux, however it makes it easier for the people who are trying to help. Sadly you can run into jerks and gatekeepers everywhere but fortunately they are not a big portion, they just talk loudly.
Once you learned the CLI, it's almost always the same and it changes very little in time. This is the hard part and normal user don't need to know CLI anymore, which is why the desktop Linux adoption gets better nowadays. But if you're a power user, you'll need to learn the CLI, at least the parts you require.
Sorry, I should've mentioned it at least once. It means desktop environment. You may also see people talk about WMs, those are window managers. Every DE has a WM, but if you decide to use a standalone WM, you'll need to install every other software yourself which normally come as bundled in a DE. Of course, I'm not talking about distros that come with WM options. Those usually cover the software part pre-installed. If you don't want to configure anything on yourself, DEs are the safe choice here. If you enjoy configuring everything (at least I'm looking at it that way) to your needs, you usually do that once (and upload your configs to your personal repo, that way when you need a reinstall, you just pull your configs from
gitand you're ready to go). That's why Linux veterans seem to prefer WMs a lot. There is no limit to configuration, this is both pro and con, depending on where you stand.Regarding not auto-mounting, the main reason there most likely security related. Again, I agree that more distros should offer more visible options related to that, though some distros already do that. But it should stay as a choice. There are differences between Windows and Linux and this is one of those. If you're talking about the filesystems on the disks installed in your PC case, they'll auto-mount if they're a Linux filesystem. As default, this won't happen with NTFS partitions.
I would be inclined to agree with that if it didn't auto mount my external drives, if you aren't mounting media in the name of security removable drives is the thing you generally block.
It doesn't on Bazzite for sure, these are new disks that were formatted at install with BTRFS. They aren't old drives ported from another system. Even with a native file system it still refused to mount unless I did so manually.
As for the command line, I fully intend to learn CLI in linux and thanks to all the fucking around I had to do I'm already on the way. But to put in in context I would never try to start off a novice windows user with powershell or command line as there are very few things you can't do with some part of the GUI.
I can navigate both with ease because I grew up doing it, but someone new is not going to know how to use it or feel comfortable with it so I will provide any instructions needed through the GUI unless absolutely necessary. once they have become comfortable then I walk the through the more advanced stuff if they care to learn it and if they don't then I don't pressure them.
Regardless I have it working now but the idea that I had to jump through all those hoops just to have basic functionality leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.