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.'"

Comments

Re:Config files.

[devent]

Why should you? Under Linux you never have to change the PATH. The applications will be installed in pre-defined directories and the path is already set. It's only in Windows where you just install applications in random places and need to change the PATH in this horrible small dialog, plus you need to restart Windows to make it work.

In Linux it's just works, but if you really need to change the path you should be knowing what you do.