gui or w/o gui?

[SMiL3Y]

i'm just wondering if people using linux/unix prefer to work without GUI or with GUI? When it comes to mastering linux/unix. Is it better to work with GUI or just shell?

[HTRegz]

Definately the console.....

I ran linux (RedHat and later Mandrake) as my only OS for a 5 year period... and while I had X Windows installed for playing the occasional game when I got bored.. i stuck to the console...most of my gaves were even console games (There are some cool ones out there).... BitchX for irc, mICQ for ICQ/MSN/Yahoo, mpg123 with an ncurses front end.. pico for all my editing, pine for my email... lynx/links for my browsing and zgv for viewing graphics... You can do it all from the console.. and you can run things much faster and much more smoothly using just a keyboard, than you ever could using a keyboard and mouse.

Anyways that's just my two cents.

[Jabberwocky]

whatever makes you most productive. true you can get along just fine with a console only, but that doesn't mean gui is counter-productive. it all depends what you use the computer for.

personally i have one machine that has no gui, and doesnt even have a monitor hooked to it at the moment, i just ssh into it. my other two computers have lightweight gui's (window maker and fluxbox) and i think that i get along just fine. use whatever makes you comfortable.

[David Anasco]

The neat thing about Linux is that you can have both the GUI and the shell to do the things you want. I used to be a real Nazi about the GUI, only starting x when I really needed to, I even tried to do most of my web browsing using lynx. However, I have changed my tune. I went ahead and set my default boot to GUI using Gnome, keeping the shortcut to the terminal ever handy. I agree with jabberwocky, whatever makes you most productive.

[problemchild]

To me, it depends on what I'm doing. For a desktop machine, I always use X. Web browsing with Lynx is not a very pleasant experience, and IMHO anybody who thinks it is just has a thing for pain.

But servers are a different story, and this flexibility is one of the reasons why in most cases *nix will run rings around Windows in the server department. At my house, I run a Linux gateway on a PPro 200 and a Linux mail/DNS server on a P-233 - both headless and administered completely via SSH - and it would be ridiculous to have XFree86 running on those machines, chewing up RAM and CPU cycles. Could you imagine running Win2k Server with its full-blown GUI on those machines?