I never understood the elitism with command line interfaces. To be fair, I do get it (lol) but I think, most of the time, it’s just impractical.
Don’t get me wrong, I started as in the CLI environment – my first computer ran in MS-DOS and remember, I’m a boomer so I had to claw my way out of the system with no clear documentation whatsoever except for a giant MSDOS reference book. The interwebz environment wasn’t as robust as it is now, I was still in dial up AOL and websites were at their infancy.
So I had to slug it out in the CLI environment till I managed to get a computer with Win 95 on it and that’s what really shifted my paradigm from CLI to DE. I just love how I can customize a DE, but I eventually didn’t like how I was locked into it – since it was a Microsoft propriety software.
I ended up hearing about Linux and I think I managed to get a LIVE CD of a Red Hat Linux distro but like I said, support at that time was lacking for a n00b such as myself so I never really made the jump.
Now fast forward to today, Win11 with VM running a couple of distros; Arch, Tiny and Puppy Linux.
I still enjoy my rare adventures in the CLI and I try to keep up due to the CLI being so prominent in the programming environment but overall, I enjoy being in the DE while having the options to go CLI when needed.
As for myself, my focus on computing generally is speed but secondly, I also focus on adaptability and stability – so I feel like myself personally, I get the best of both worlds. I’m generally faster in execution than my DE/Winxx counterparts and while I’m not as fast as my CLI peeps, they give me enough respect because I do know my way around and they always try to convert me to their ranks (lol),
Overall, I feel like this argument is subjective and depends around what technology you were around with at the time you really got into computers. Just enjoy what stack you enjoy working with, and while we can never get to the same speed as CLI (due to the lack of execution gap in that environment) – we can still get our stuff done pretty fast as well.