And I don't think they are even claiming that a graphical presentation of the same info is necessarily wrong or pointless, they are simply saying, that's a lot of c++ for merely wrapping the text in some gui widgets.
It's a fair observation.
I can imagine generating say an html rendition that looks almost the same in a few k of shell. Maybe there's more to it and it wouldn't be so simple, but that is what it looks like.
but that's the thing, the target audience for "CPU-Z for Linux" is not people who want the information (because if you do it's of course trivial to google and find out about /proc/cpuinfo), it's people who want to use a software which is as close as possible to the original CPU-Z (so HTML layout definitely does not cut it either).
> I can imagine generating say an html rendition that looks almost the same in a few k of shell.
considering that the source code assumes that dmidecode won't be present (it embeds it) I doubt you'd reimplement the whole dmidecode in only a few k lines of shell. And that's just a small part of what CPU-X does.