> Doesn't Windows, the most popular OS out there, ...

The most popular desktop OS. It is nowhere to be found in the Top 500 supercomputers, is nowhere to be found on smartphones, lags in the Cloud, is nowhere to be found in the billions of appliances, etc.

> Why isn't that harming Windows?

It is harming Windows. That horrible cmd.exe is one of the reason Windows lost in all the other markets and has hardly any market share there.

> is nowhere to be found in the billions of appliances, etc.

It is unfortunately found in plenty of embedded systems. Usually not in cheap end-user appliances though where it is outpriced due to both the OS license as well as the hardware required.

Seriously.

Back in the 90's a lot of movie production was being done on the SGI IRIX computers. Jurassic Park themed ones even. Really spiffy machines with both an excellent GUI and terminal.

Cheap WIN NT boxes with nVidia GPUs on them, were seen as the beat path forward.

SGI gear is also Jurassic Park style, "Spare no expense" and was not cheap! Super expensive machines, but people got what they paid for too.

Alias, Maya were ported to Windows and off to the races right?

Nope. Unix scripting, that awesome terminal and friends made all the difference in the world.

This was true even for smaller or single person shops who would do the work in a now slower SGI because the user experience was bang on point and that meant getting the desired outcome first time no bullshit.

The minute we had nVidia drivers, Linux was in to replace the SGI machines.

And, the production community realized they could each write tools or poet tools they were good at, share and share alike (to a point) and all be in business a whole lot cheaper and faster.

That took a couple maybe few years.

The "terminal" and what can happen in one and why really does matter.

Windows Power Shell is pretty OK at this point, but it is still its own thing, not playing very nice with the other kids in the sane box.

Lol, I always thought Microsoft happening in Redmond was symbolic. It really is!

Windows has a new terminal as default that is pretty cool - I install MSYS2 and set it in the new Windows Terminal and it's all good. Gnome Terminal and other terminals on Linux are also pretty cool too.

If you want the worst default terminal experience just boot macOS.

Can you explain what's the big appeal of other terminal apps? I have been using Terminal for 21 years without any issue -- but I'm open to trying something else.

Actually I've only this year switched to an "AI enabled" terminal app called Warp.

I’m curious to know what your experience of changing to Warp has been like? Sounds like terminal was working fine for you - was the switch worth the time?

I signed up for the waitlist ages ago and finally got the announcement of Linux support in February but am still yet to try it. Mainly because I’ve had a particularly busy year and I can’t justify fiddling around with my stack just for fun. I have no appetite for the risk I may lose hours to fixing something that goes wrong.

On Warp: After adjusting a couple of minor settings, I found Warp to be worth it. In fact, I at first trialed it 'side by side,' meaning keeping Terminal.app and Warp both open -- and found myself going for the Warp window more often. So it was an easy call for me.

I chose to not use its custom prompt because I wanted things to be more 'stock' in the terminal and not to rely on an app external to the shell for the features -- the only really fancy prompt feature I have is git branch display, and that's already working fine with my existing zsh prompt.

So, anyway, I can vouch that it didn't try to make changes to my environment (other than that offering to override the prompt, which I think it does in a way that doesn't update your .zshrc/.bashrc file anyway).

And for what it does do, I think it's great. Having command outputs separated and in little scrolling panes, really great. And mouse-able, standard text field to edit commands in, also amazing. Say you have a long URL on the clipboard with a {object_id} variable in the middle. You can paste it in, and use the mouse to select "{object_id}" and replace it instead of using arrow keys etc. to manually delete and replace the variable. So with the above efficiency gains it is already pretty cool compared to any kind of terminal app I knew of.

The AI stuff has been great to have as well. It's really convenient to have free access, right in the terminal, to an LLM that I assume has been well prompted to produce shell or scripting code as requested.

One thing I turned off is their recent "Detect natural language automatically" feature. Before, if you wanted to invoke AI, you just did a #comment. So for instance "# docker command to remove exited containers" -- well, they updated it so that even without that "#" it should "just know" from inspecting the command. But I had a problem with it getting confused by a shell command that was also parseable as 2 English words. I think I prefer actually knowing whether I'm commanding a shell or operating an LLM, anyway.

BTW - it occurs to me that there are also big categories of features that it has which I don't even use, such as like, runbooks that can automate frequently-done tasks, things like that. Those may also factor into your decision.

I use MSYS2 too, can't stand WSL. Foe my terminal choice, I find wezterm to be awesome for my daily 3 OS use.

Essentially nothing in Windows requires cmd.exe. Having a terminal in a desktop OS isn't a problem. Needing one is.

Just like having a GUI isn't a problem for a server OS, but needing one is a problem.

Apple would disagree with you on both counts.

Plus for a long time desktop Windows needed cmd.exe to support login scripts.

Just as people use Linux daily without ever touching the command line. Eg Android, LG smart TVs (webOS), Satellite TV set top boxes (eg Sky Q), home routers, etc.

And if you want to focus on Linux running on laptops, then there are ChromeBooks and the old Asus EeePCs.

The reason desktop Linux isn’t polished is because every time a company invests heavily into desktop Linux, Microsoft undercuts them (like how they sold XP at a loss to thwart Linux in the netbook market). But the fact that Apple could take BSD, Google take Linux, and Nintendo also run BSD on some of their consoles, really speaks volumes about how there’s nothing technically stopping people running a POSIX platform like Linux and still hide the command line from regular users.

Though going back to my “Linux isn’t polished” point, I still think Linux+KDE is a lot more polished than modern Windows. But that’s just my biased opinion.

I agree about Linux + KDE being more polished.

For my main point, I suppose I should have specified GNU/Systemd/Linux as needing a CLI, not everything with a Linux kernel. POSIX-style kernel + libc is a very good basis for an OS, and such an OS doesn't need a CLI exposed to the user. It's all the Udev/Systemd/SysVInit & similar stuff that's CLI-only, and desktop Linux tends to require interacting with one or more of those on at least an occasional basis.

There are web based GUIs for systemd (and sysv init too).

But the main reason you don’t see GUIs for those services is because Desktop distros tend to abstract away systemd so you don’t even need to manage it, let alone have a GUI to do so.

Like with Windows, the average user wouldn’t be manually managing what services to start and stop.

And that’s the real crux of things. A lot of the stuff that people say you need a CLI for in Linux are operations that the average user wouldn’t know nor want to do on Windows even with a GUI. They just run a browser and if the machine goes slow they ask someone technical (friend or shop) to fix. I know this because I used to be that friend.

So I really don’t think the CLI is what holds back Linux. It’s just the economics was never there while Microsoft dominated the desktop world. And these days most people use phones and tablets as their general purpose device, so in a way Linux did eventually win anyway.

> Just as people use Linux daily without ever touching the command line. Eg Android, LG smart TVs (webOS), Satellite TV set top boxes (eg Sky Q), home routers, etc.

None of those are (used as) general purpose computers though.

Did you read my next paragraph where I acknowledged that point myself and gave some laptop examples too?

Plus I’d argue Android is the average persons general purpose computer. At least in terms of the people I know, they use their phones for 99% of things and actively avoid using a laptop as much as they can.

That does not match my experience, even if I also believed that myth.

At one time I had to install Windows Enterprise IoT on several kinds of embedded computers, all of which had various quirks.

The computers worked fine in Linux, from the first attempt to boot it, without the need to do anything special, but a customer wanted to have Windows on those.

After installing Windows, there have been a lot of problems, for instance Windows was unbelievably slow, because the SSD's had a very low writing speed, but they could not be replaced with decent SSD's, because the embedded computers were certified for certain applications only with their original components.

Making Windows usable on those computers has required a week of tuning and finding various workarounds by searching the Windows Knowledge Base and various Internet Forums, where many Windows users had the same complaints as me, but few were able to provide good advice about how to solve the problems.

I have been astonished to discover that for every workaround I was not able to find any way to do it in any graphic interface of Windows, but all workarounds required to use in a Cmd window some obscure Microsoft command-line utilities with a lot of magic command-line options, which I did not understand and I could not find in the official Windows Knowledge Base, but which were suggested as solutions on various Internet forums and indeed they worked as desired.