Please define "powerful" in this context.

As I see it, a GUI can never be as complete (or powerful) as a CLI, simply because the CLI is unlimited. Due to their nature, GUIs are always a compromise between form and function, so something which one person considers "powerful" will be useless to another.

A CLI faces none of these limitations, purely because it doesn't have to conform to anyone's idea of how it should look or behave or what functionality it should contain.

For users who don't know how to use the commandline, the GUI is more powerful. I'm just saying that I don't believe X's sole purpose is to extend the functionality of the CLI. For many users (even on Linux), it is a replacement of the GUI.

Well... it comes down to your apps, and most of the apps I use are graphical. I use the CLI pretty much exclusively for system administration; I keep a terminal emulator open on each of my virtual desktops. Why not have the best of both worlds?

Well that's what I have my Ubuntu for

But nothing beats the feel of typing out your demands and having them met with snappy, textual response!

To me, Ubuntu is the worst of all worlds... no offense to anyone, but I have never had anything but bad luck with that distro.

Here's a script I have as an example of what I mean about CLI and GUI working together
I simply type "playcd" at the command-line and it picks a CD from my collection at random and if I'm running in an X-Window environment it starts the audacious GUI to play it in a temporary playlist.
If I don't feel like listening to that CD, I just type playcd again and it will replace the temporary playlist with a new one in the already running instance of audacious.

You'll also see that I have ogg123 as a fallback incase I'm not running in X. (All my music is in .flac)


The point I'm trying to make showing you this is that because the audacious developers understood that the X GUI and command-line aren't two completely separate and competing environments we users can do nice little things like this from the command-line.

CLI is not outdated or obsolete and the GUI is not a replacement. Their full power is only seen when you start to use them together.

P.S.
My music is stored in a "/local/Music/Artist/Album/track - title.flac" structure, if anyone wants to try the above code for themselves.

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When I used to self-host my website, I almost never used the GUI for maintenance on my server (Slackware). (I used the GUI a lot to make it work in the first place when I was learning my way around Linux.)

I'd log in, do what I had to do, and log out.

Now I tend mostly to use a GUI (Fluxbox) for day-to-day computing (the website is out on GoDaddy), but I'm likely to do maintenance from the GUI. Even on my Ubuntu and Debian machines, I'm more likely to open a terminal and sudo update-manager than I am to start Update Manager from the menu.

The command line is always faster, as long as one knows the commands.

On my machine I use dwm as window manager. Basically just because its very nice to work with terminals (in my case urxvt) within that wm. The only reason I need X is because of Firefox (with the vimperator plugin for easy keyboard control) and sometimes picture editing or LibreOffice. So even though I am using X on a daily basis you could consider me a non-GUI user.

I've never had anything but *good* luck with Ubuntu! Lol, I guess we just had different experiences.

I have my terminal on the desktop so I have it all combined and ready.

Exactly the same for me, except I use Openbox. I also wonder how many Slackware users don't even use a GUI file manager but handle it all via the command line. I've tried to use mc on occasion, but to me it's more of a hindrance than a help.

I'm sure a large part of my preference is due to laziness, having acquired most of my command line knowledge ~20 years ago. But it's also nice not having to relearn everything whenever some GUI designer decides to change it.

I agree that a GUI file manager is a major hinderance! I have tried to use mc also but if you are already in a shell nothing could be faster than the simple navigation and manipulation commands already available.

Another benefit of doing all file management from the shell is that your awareness of where you are and what you have is light years ahead of those who rely on GUI file tools.

Well, the default init for slackware is 3 and I am going to let it be there as long as slackware decides to change it. I only use gui to watch movies, edit some pictures or to play games (pysol,kpat).
Other than that I really see no use to run startx.

i have yakuake autostart in my slackware. I use CLI for my file management and administrative task. but I use Firefox for browsing(which i use heavily).

To be precise X is not a GUI. In the core it is a server.

I use the command line for anything related to the file system or configuration. I use FVWM2, customised to exactly how I want it. I don't even have a file browser in the menu lol.

Ask this in the Ubuntu section and I'd imagine you'd get a set of very different answers.