[asoneth]

> whether requiring them to copy and paste is actually any more secure than allowing click-to-install...

Agreed. If your operating system requires that you occasionally search for instructions and copy-and-paste executable strings from the internet, that seems less efficient, less learnable, and less secure than any GUI I know of.

Perhaps at some point terminals will bake in an LLM as an intermediary to convert between human-readable instructions and terminal commands, and then we just have to worry about the alignment of those LLMs...

[lproven]

There are 2 things here to note which explain why.

* Most distros offer multiple desktops. This is true of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, etc.

Point-and-click instructions are limited to only 1 desktop. Shell instructions work on all of them.

* GUI instructions can't be copied and pasted. They must be performed by the user. But most people do not know the difference between buttons and spinners and input boxes. It's very very hard to write specific instructions for people who lack the vocabulary for GUI controls.

I speak as a former docs writer.

[asoneth]

> Point-and-click instructions are limited to only 1 desktop...

If a consumer product (computer, phone, TV, microwave, printer, radio, oven, washing machine, etc) requires reading through more than a quick start guide to access the advertised functionality, then it has failed as a consumer product.

> GUI instructions can't be copied and pasted

Training my nontechnical friends and relatives to copy, paste, and execute terminal commands they found on the internet does not strike me as a very good alternative.