Free software scares normal people

If handbrake scares them, don’t you dare to demonstrate how to use ffmpeg. I remember when I used handbrake for the first time and thought “wow, it’s much more convenient than struggling with ffmpeg”.

At least with ffmpeg, for 99% of use cases you can just google "how do I do X with ffmpeg" and get a copypasta command line.

Whereas with complicated GUI tools, you have to watch a video to learn how to do it.

I think GUI tools lend themselves more to being able to discover functionality intuitively without needing to look anything up or read a manual, and especially so if you’re coming back to a task you haven’t done in a while. With CLI I constantly have to google or ask an LLM about commands I’ve done many times, whereas with a gui if I do it once I can more easily find my way the next time. Anyway both have their place

> I think GUI tools lend themselves more to being able to discover functionality intuitively without needing to look anything up or read a manual

Well, there are different issues.

Reading a manual is the best you can do, theoretically. But Linux CLI tools have terrible manuals.

I read over the ssh man page multiple times looking for functionality that was available. But the man page failed to make that clear. I had to learn about it from random tutorials instead.

I've been reading lvm documentation recently and it shows some bizarre patterns. Stuff like "for more on this see [related man page]", where [related man page] doesn't have any "more on this". Or, here's what happens if you try to get CLI help:

1. You say `pvs --help`, and get a summary of what flags you can provide to the tool. The big one is -o, documented as `[ -o|--options String ]`. The String defines the information you want. All you have to do is provide the right "options" and you're good. What are they? Well, the --help output ends with this: "Use --longhelp to show all options and advanced commands."

2. Invoke --longhelp and you get nothing about options or advanced commands, although you do get some documentation about the syntax of referring to volumes.

3. Check the man page, and the options aren't there either. Buried inside the documentation for -o is the following sentence: "Use -o help to view the list of all available fields."

4. Back to the command line. `pvs -o help` actually will provide the relevant documentation.

Reading a manual would be fine... if it actually contained the information it was supposed to, arranged in some kind of logically-organized structure. Instead, information on any given topic is spread out across several different types of documentation, with broken cross-references and suggestions that you should try doing the wrong thing.

I'm picking on man pages here, but actually Microsoft's official documentation for their various .NET stuff has the same problem at least as badly.