I plan on installing Ubuntu on a spare PC in the next week. This will be the first time working with Linux.
There was a reason the GUI was so welcomed.
Command line apps have been silly for 40 years. Why memorize commands and parameters or have to type in help? A GUI presents all options immediately. It even combines commands so the constant typing and time delays are reduced to nothing.
The bickering in the thread is amusing but has caused some to lose sight of what the intended discussion was originally supposed to be about. Although there are few here who have gone off on a tangent as often as I have.
If one is using Linux for the typical tasks that most people use a computer for... web browsing, producing or reading a document or e-book, editing images or video, watching videos, listening to music, or videoconferencing, the GUI is obviously much easier for nearly everyone to use. However, when one is initially setting up a computer for tasks like serving web pages or running AI models locally or externally, etc, etc... there typically is no substitute for a terminal aka the command line.
In some ways I feel lucky to have started out before GUIs were used for almost everything. But I have to admit that these days I am still much more comfortable using Ubuntu Server after getting XFCE which is the most popular lightweight GUI chosen for that platform. It is just so much easier to have all of your tools represented by icons that you can select with a mouse. I even like to set it up on a rented remote VPS (Virtual Private Servers) such as Hostinger’s KVM series https://www.hostinger.com/vps-hosting#pricing . But even then, you still have to go into a terminal to accomplish many tasks when you are setting something up no matter which environment that you choose.
Even trying to use terms that most people around here likely have some familiarity with... People whose contact with a computer is using Windows or a Mac almost immediately zone out when you try to talk about anything that they can’t double click on to start up.