Which graphical system utlities you miss on Linux?
Hello everyone! I know that Linux GUI advanced in last few years but we still lack some good system configuration tools for advanced users or sysadmins. What utilities you miss on Linux? And is there any normal third party alternatives?
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I generally don't miss anything graphical, once I learn how to do something from the cli I rarely feel the need to do it graphically anymore as it's usually a lot slower
The obvious one would be Photoshop and paint.net of course but krita does the trick
I maybe need to correct my post. I am talking about system utilities like Device Manager or something else.
Why would I want gui for those things? CLI is often a better interface. Being able to grep lsusb rather than scanning a gui for an entry is much better. It's easier to pipe to an email as well. Screenshots don't allow copy/paste...
As a newcomer to CLIs, GUI are great because you don't need to know what you're looking for. I can just open the devices window, and they're all there, with most of the extra hardware stuff that's not actually a real device already cleaned out.
To do the same with a CLI would take me 10 minutes of looking up what the hardware commands are, 5 minutes figuring out flags, and 30 minutes researching entries to see if they're important. Even just a collapsible list would make that last step so much easier. And no, I can't grep for what I need, because I don't know what I need, I just know something in there is important with a vague idea of what it might look like.
Once I figure that all out for one thing, the best I can do is write that to a notes file so I don't need to search so far next time, but there's a good chance that I'll need a different combination of commands next time anyway.
Not hating on CLIs, just wishing I could figure out how to use them faster.
apropos - command to list relevant commands tldr [command] - shows the most commonly used flags/options for that program
apropos comes installed by default (on debian at least), tldr needs to be installed with your package manager
As someone who cannot even remember tar flags (inser xkcd here), tldr is very helpful
Your 45 mins becomes 5 mins now. Hope that helps
Another really helpful tool is to use the fish shell instead of bash. It has tons of useful features, but my favorite is by far the autocomplete. It parses man pages to provide suggestions for flags, subcommands, even passed arguments, and each item in the results list has a description, and it's all searchable by hitting shift+tab.
That's what leveled up my cli game from 0-100. It's a massive difference in usability and discoverability. And unlike things like nushell, it's close enough to bash that you won't feel confused if you have to use bash instead.
👆 exhibit A of why Linux can be difficult for newcomers
Linux has been very successful without catering to those who don't want to learn new things.
Hmm, what does lsusb do?
The name is constructed from two parts:
ls: list usb: usb It lists usb devices that your machine (/kernel) knows has been connected; they may not necessarily be usable.
E.g. I have some sound output device connected via USB to one machine. On most of my machines I've switched from pulseaudio to pipewire¹, and I figured I'd bring that machine closer to the others so there's less variance. Unfortunately the sound output device didn't want to work with pipewire. The problem manifested as no sound and pipewire not listing the device. lsusb helped me know that the machine at the very least recognized the device, but wasn't currently able to use it. (It did actually also show up as an error in dmesg -H, but reinstating pulseaudio let the device work again as normally. So now I just have to live with a situation where some machines use pipewire because bluetooth and others use pulseaudio because … usb?¹)
¹ There's a memory of ALSA vs OSS I didn't want to be reminded of
Ah thanks, I wonder if GUI tools for this is useful. Especially if it is for system diagnostics.
I think I wouldn't find it particularly useful, as I'm used to the quasi-programming I can do in a terminal. The shell commands take some time & effort to learn, but once you're over that hump, being able to extract and compose information is really good. The primary shell tools I'd miss in a gui are |, jq, awk, sed and grep/rg, as well as for, if, while, variables, and having everything in one lightweight window.
Lshw, lsusb, etc and grep do that