gui or w/o gui?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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. :D

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? :eek: