I'm fairly ambidextrous when it comes to GUI vs Terminal. I tend to go with whichever is easier or more precise, depending on the need at hand.

Hi everybody. Mostly I prefer a GUI if it is plain, simple to use. With things going on as they are though, this preference becomes a challenge with far too much useless eye candy and stupid effects. I'm very familiar with MS-DOS commands, and still use them from time to time, but with Linux, set aside when forced to, and the commands being written on forehand to be just copied in the terminal, nothing goes beyond a plain and simple GUI. And that's the problem. In spite of what some people say, the commands with Linux in the terminal are nearly impossible to remember... With MS-DOS, a half dozen commands easy to remember already allow the average user to work. Sorry, but although I know the Linux command line to be powerful, it seems only for freaks, specialists and hackers. And keep in mind I use Linux with pleasure on a daily basis. So, no, the Linux terminal is not easy to use, and at the same time the GUI becomes annoying (not only with Linux by the way ;0) For most users I think everything should be made possible within a simple GUI. No offence meant to anyone.

GUI for work that needs the graphic display (Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice etc) but terminal for many others that cannot be done quickly in the GUI, like du and df, and vi for a quick mod to a script....

It isn't but If everything was possible in GUI we'd all say GUI - so GUI

The poll is lacking the option “None”

Honestly, I prefer the GUI but would have to consult a psychologist to know exactly why this is so.

Becoming more and more paranoiac about the Internet, the console can have a reassuring effect, although I cannot claim to know that a text-mode browser or a text-mode mail-agent must be “more secure” or anything.

But anyway, I rarely know which file-browser is currently available on my desktop, as, for file-browsing and all kinds of configuration I prefer opening a pseudo-terminal and to edit files in vim. The same for HTML and programming. Web-Forums other than LQ are difficult to use in W3M, but I always liked Usenet which is naturally simple to access with a text-mode newsreader.

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browsing with firefox
testing in terminal, development in eclipse for C/C++

Often there is no choice. When there is a choice I typically choose whichever I think will be quicker.

My system is configured to come up with a blank desktop - no links, icons, nothing except a nice picture. I have a taskbar at the bottom, which hides until my cursor hovers over it. The only icons that appear on the desktop are shown when I connect an external drive.

I always have at least one terminal window open, often more, and I do most system chores from one or more of those. But I do use a number of applications that are graphical, and the frequently used (Firefox, Thunderbird, Darktable, Libreoffice, Audacity) have custom hotkeys. Other graphical apps, I usually start from a command prompt, but there are a few that I do start from the menu.

So, I answered "Terminal", since that's what I prefer to use, but I'm not averse to graphical operations. I think I'd like the graphical side better if I didn't occasionally accidentally highlight a few paragraphs of text in LibreOffice, then wipe them out with my next keystroke before I notice that they are even highlighted. That just drives me crazy! Cntl U is hardwired in my fingers, but I'm often a few keystrokes down the road before my attention catches up to the new course.

Do they even make terminals anymore? And how does "terminal" (hardware designed for communicating with a server) oppose "GUI" (a design concept, not software or hardware)?

Perhaps the question should have given the options "Terminal Emulator" vs "Graphical Desktop" or "X Server".

...

But really you meant "keyboarding" vs. "mouse/touch"

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I prefer the G.U.I. because it's intuitive, faster, and modern. I despise the terminal because it's ancient, counterintuitive, and slow because you have to waste so much time searching the Internet for a command, sometimes Internet searches for commands can brick your system requiring a full re-install to remedy it. Watch me get attacked, discriminated against, and penalized for stating the facts by the hypocrites that the forum rules never apply to.

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I use GUI only for browsing, email and pdf, everything else in terminal.

Both but am terminal oriented.

For Java, Python, Dart, etc I prefer an IDE, IntelliJ to be particular.
For Bash, I prefer vim. Is that console mode???
For Admin tasks, I prefer console when I know how.

Its been almost 2 decades, but when I used IBM's AIX version of Unix, I really liked the GUI System Admin tool which allowed you to see the command line that it executed. You could then easily put any repetitive task in a shell script. The best of both worlds.

Terminal. If I preferred GUI I would be using Windows or macOS!