Do folks managing servers mainly do so via command-line interfaces?
Or is that more of a stereotype, and there are some (maybe more?) out there using some form of graphical interfaces/web dashboards/etc.?
It's struck me as interesting how when you look up info about managing servers that they primarily go through command-line interfaces/terminals/etc. It's made me wonder how much of that's preference and how much of it's an absence of graphical interfaces.
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GUIs are a useful tool to give common users an accessible way to understand how they're interacting with technology. They're best utilized,I think, when the point of the technology is to be viewed. Like imagine you had to browse and launch Netflix shows in a terminal. That would be incredibly annoying.
In contrast, its really goddamn slow to perform routine server maintenance and commands through a GUI. I save so much time managing my servers through CLI, scripting, and automated tasks. Almost everything I'm dealing with is text based information.
What I miss in the CLI, is proper structure in the text.
For example, a good IDE will list all problems found with your code, ordered in a sensible way. If I then click in a problem, it expands, and I get to see the full text description of that error. I can then click on a file/line combo, and be directed immediately there.
If I run CMake directly, I get kilobytes of error message dumped into a single blob of text.
Colors, line prefixes, and separator lines attempt to bring some structure into this mess, but it still remains a big wall of text.
It takes less effort for me to process the data presented to me by a good IDE, because it is organized and structured.
Same thing with git commits/branches/tags.
Same thing with diffs/merges.
Almost ALL text data can be organized in some way. But most text data is not big enough or common enough, that it is worth our time and effort to structure it that well. I therefor see GUIs as tools for when you are doing something so commonly done, that the effort of structuring the data was worth it.
This is the entire point of PowerShell