Or is that more of a stereotype, and there are some (maybe more?) out there using some form of graphical interfaces/web dashboards/etc.?
It’s struck me as interesting how when you look up info about managing servers that they primarily go through command-line interfaces/terminals/etc. It’s made me wonder how much of that’s preference and how much of it’s an absence of graphical interfaces.
Yes I personally find it much quicker running a few commands via SSH and editing Docker compose files in a text editor than clicking around in some kind of web interface. It’s also much easier asking for help or helping someone else I you can just send commands to execute instead of explaining different menus and buttons they need to go into.
Software engineer here who works on web services. Most production-critical things in our workplace aren’t managed by GUI’s, or command lines… but by code. There are usually some infrastructure-as-code tools involved, like Terraform, CDK or Pulumi.
GUI’s are often reserved for quick fixes and trying out things on staging servers (derisively called “click-ops”).
I work all day with Kubernetes, remote servers, web applications and stuff like that. We’re usually trying to conserve resources for the actual apps we run — it wouldn’t make any sense to install an entire GUI / desktop OS on these things.
At home I manage my router, server, NAS almost exclusively from the terminal. There’s just no reason to use a GUI. GUI kind of sucks, you have to move your hand away from the keyboard to point and click, it’s far more constrained and for the most part it only serves as a wrapper to more advanced functionality.
