As a terminal fan, my main reasons for preferring them over a gui (for some tasks) are:

1. It’s faster to type than to navigate menus
2. If I don’t know where something is and can’t guess it instantly, it’s usually faster to search for it in a man page than randomly digging through gui menus
3. You can combine commands with each other with pipes or $()
4. You can search through your command history to find previous commands
5. You can write scripts and aliases to automate common tasks
6. The terminal requires less context switching. Typing ten commands is less mentally taxing than opening ten different guis

The barrier for entry is higher with terminals but unless you need visual feedback (e.g. because you’re editing an image) it’s easier and faster for both common and rare tasks.

Because it just works ™. And it is flexible to a point that no GUI can ever accomplish. It’s liberating. It’s repeatable, It’s automatable. It’s about control. And most importantly, it’s FAST!

If you try to max out the control, GUI comes out of as an UX disaster. Check any enterprise software GUI to see what I mean. There will be lot’s and lot’s of buttons all around, and you would also end up with some kind of text input or programming environment inside it.

I agree in certain circumstances. For example a file manager I don’t understand why people use in a terminal. When I need to do like batch deletions or something I can easily just write a couple terminal commands. Everything else I just use the default file manager. Either Finder on MacOS or the Gnome one on Linux.

But stuff like vim, a terminal text editor, is simply more fluid and enjoyable than a GUI program. I’ve tried using vim plugins for various different GUI text editors like Sublime or VS Code but there’s nothing like a personalized vim install. It takes a little bit to get used to the commands, but once you do it’s like riding a bike. You just feel faster and muscle memory takes care of the rest. You don’t actively think about it

same thing with for example package managers. it’s faster to just press my hotkey to open up terminal, type in “sudo dnf install <whatever>” and it’s installed. why do we need a GUI here? it doesn’t make anything faster. In fact, it just gets in the way.

so some things GUIs don’t actually improve. Some they do. It’s a per case thing I think

It’s way easier to communicate a terminal based solution over the internet. Instead of making a guide with images, possibly needing annotation, you can just say “run x, y, z in order” and the user can just copy and paste it (even though it’s a bad habit to run random commands off the internet)

I mean you could certainly have both but Linux treating its terminal as a first class interface is a big part of why it’s still used so much in the server/dev world I think. Having a command line interface that’s not an afterthought, fully scriptable, and can be automated is very convenient whereas on Windows you have things like PowerShell where not every program you want to do things with in PowerShell has a way to interact with PowerShell, since in Windows you have the opposite problem of GUI being the only first class interface.

You still need similar memorisation when using a GUI.

You don’t give the GUI process a second thought as you’re used to the steps, similar to those using the terminal.

For example, in Windows to create a new text file, save it, and copy it.

You need to know the name of the application (notepad), how to find and open it from the Start menu, the steps within notepad to save the file and the path to save to (file -> save -> navigate to path), the name of the file explorer (Windows Explorer) and how to find and open it, how to navigate to the file, the steps to copying a file (right click copy or ctrl-c), and pasting the file (right click paste or ctrl-v).

On the terminal, it’s a case of remembering commands/switches:
vim document.txt
:wq (write quit)
cp document.txt documentnew.txt
rm document.txt

Both processes require memorisation of specific sequence of steps which overtime you’ll become accustom to and not have to actively think about when repeating a similar process.

My preference is the terminal as it is quicker and simpler in most instances and without the clutter of everything that comes with a GUI application.

Because you have much more control

There should be a good GUI for everything but a terminal offers more options to do certain things a lot faster. Especially in work environments. And once you’re used to this level of efficiency and control you’re not likely to stop doing that in your home network.

I just find certain things to be quicker in the terminal than doing it through a GUI.

Like installing software. I think it’s quicker and more direct to do something like sudo pacman -S Firefox than to go through a gui. Especially if Im using a drop down terminal that I have hot keyed.

As for remembering everything, I’d say it’s just a matter of experience. Like, you had to learn how to use a GUI app at one point or another.

This is what sucks about Linux. It’s still not as complete as Windows in that regard… Things being too techy, even the real user friendly ones still got it.