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Take This GUI and Shove It
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia speaks out against the overemphasis on GUIs in today's admin tools, saying that GUIs are fine and necessary in many cases, but only after a complete CLI is in place, and that they cannot interfere with the use of the CLI, only complement it. Otherwise, the GUI simply makes easy things easy and hard things much harder. He writes, 'If you have to make significant, identical changes to a bunch of Linux servers, is it easier to log into them one-by-one and run through a GUI or text-menu tool, or write a quick shell script that hits each box and either makes the changes or simply pulls down a few new config files and restarts some services? And it's not just about conservation of effort — it's also about accuracy. If you write a script, you're certain that the changes made will be identical on each box. If you're doing them all by hand, you aren't.'"
With a CLI or a script that's easy: it comes down to "log in as user X, change to directory Y, run script Z with arguments A B and C - the output should look like D". Try that when all you have is a GLUI (like a GUI, but you get stuck): open this window, select that option, drag a slider, check these boxes, click Yes, three times. The output might look a little like this blurry screen shot and the only record of a successful execution is a window that disappears as soon as the application ends.
I suppose the Linux community should be grateful that windows made the fundemental systems design error of making everything graphic. Without that basic failure, Linux might never have even got the toe-hold it has now.
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Without a GUI it will be hard to sell, but automation is next to impossible with GUIs, so they are expensive to use in the long run because you have to pay for more Users.
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Well, one little mistake pushing a windows domain policy via GUI, and the same.
This is one of the weakest points in the article, IMO, though. It's quite possible (even if MS MMC is a kludgy example) to GUIfy multi-system administration.
There will always be a place for both GUI and CLI -- status screens, for example, generally demand a GUI (and yes, ANSI menu systems are a GUI.)
Someone had to do it.
More and more people are switching to things like Ubuntu for small business things like file-servers and the like.
Its cheap, its easy and its stable. I'm sure if you look through all of the businesses running servers, very few of them are ran by real "admins" but rather by the employee who "knows about computers"
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I have a cheap router with only a web gui. I wrote a two line bash script that simply POSTs the right requests to URL.
Simply put, HTTP interfaces, especially if they implement the right response codes, are actually very nice to script.
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Probably because it's also about the ease of troubleshooting issues.
How do you troubleshoot something with a GUI after you've misconfigured?
How do you troubleshoot a programming error (bug) in the GUI -> device communication?
How do you scale to tens, hundreds, or thousands of devices with a GUI?
CLI makes all this easier and more manageable.
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I don't think you really understand systems administration. 'Users,' or in this case admins, don't typically do stuff once. Furthermore, they need to know what he did and how to do it again (i.e. new server or whatever) or just remember what he did.
One-off stuff isn't common and is a sign of poor administration (i.e. tracking changes and following processes).
What I'm trying to get at is that admins shouldn't do anything without reading the manual. As a Windows/Linux admin, I tend to find Linux easier to properly administer because I either already know how to perform an operation or I have to read the manual (manpage) and learn a decent amount about the operation (i.e. more than click here/use this flag).
Don't get me wrong, GUIs can make unknown operations significantly easier, but they often lead to poor process management. To document processes, screenshots are typically needed. They can be done well, but I find that GUI documentation (created by admins, not vendor docs) tend to be of very low quality. They are also vulnerable to 'upgrades' where vendors change the interface design. CLI programs typically have more stable interfaces, but maybe that's just because they have been around longer...
Could be configuraion syntax. Simple, readable, concise, possible to understand even in very complicated scripts without looking at the manual. I'm using iptables routinely, but I liked pf for its simplicity.
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