I know we all enjoy being nerds and using commands (H4ckerman). But now that everything is either a gui or web based, is there really any use to terminal commands?
For example, on windows I never used powershell or cmd hardly ever. I realize now I probably could have. But Linux just drives me to use it more, which i like anyway (because let’s be honest, it makes us feel superior)


It does. On Linux you can stick to graphical applications like you do on windows, it’s just when people get on Linux they suddenly have the interest to try more things that they didn’t try on windows. 90% of the time I’m using handbrake for videos conversions. Then there’s the 10% of the time where command line ffmpeg because the functionality of the software is often greater than everything that the graphical interface has implemented or ever plans to implement.
This applies to windows too. General users usually don’t need to go into PowerShell or a WSL shell but a lot of professional users will do so. Not just IT but people that process videos, images, a lot scientist, not just Matlab types, but people that got to do mapping stuff. You grab map files, terrain data - whatever - then you need to process it for another application. A lot of cases, good luck finding a GUI that hits your specific use case but some guy that had the same problem years ago got a one liner bash command, better chance for niche use cases in my opinion.
If you play games on Steam and you ever wanted to skip intro movies or a launcher and you Google for a solution and you get an answer that says to add something to the games launch options in Steam. That’s pretty close to what people mostly do in a terminal.
Especially when on windows freeware is so frequently adware and/or abandoned last updated for windows 7 and it’s a wildcsrd if that specific functionality that is really just ffmpeg or imagemagick in the background doing the work
Deleting a huge amount of files. You’ll come across cases windows, Mac, Linux where the animations add a ton of time to the operation compared to just rm -rf 'ing a folder. Folder with a ton of files. Terminal searching for a file can be so much faster and responsive compared to GUI file explorer
Creating graphical interfaces is of critical importance for user applications for accessibility but plenty of times it’s just way faster to do it in a terminal - same with Windows and Mac.