turns off SteamDeck sorry, what’s a “terminal”? Isn’t it at the airport?

Jokes aside… yes, obviously, it only depends what you actually need to do. I recommend though NOT to be afraid of the terminal. The whole point about using Linux is to do whatever one wants. If that means avoiding the terminal, sure, that’s fine, BUT I believe the goal still is to be able to do MORE and the terminal is itself a very powerful tool. It’s not the terminal itself as much as the composability of the CLI.

So… finding a distribution with all the GUI and TUI and avoiding the CLI until they actually want to use them is great. Avoiding it entirely because no new skill was acquired is a missed opportunity IMHO. I want more Linux users, yes, but I also want BETTER users of any OS. Skilling up users so that we can all do more, together.

There are warnings so my bet is that there is an edge case where

• one runs apt and receives NO warning
• the system keeps on doing other tasks, e.g. user copies a large file on the same filesystem or log files just increasing
• user runs apt upgrade BUT now apt would warn except it’s not run again

so basically concurrency that makes it unpredictable, except if apt was the only process writing on the filesystem (which it never is).

Oof… it actually happened to me and it’s not 1 problem but 2 namely :

• you ran out of disk space while updating
• AND one of the messed up packages is one that is required for the upgrade process, e.g. curl or wget (sorry can’t recall which it actually is)

so that leaves you in a terrible stable. You can still clean up this mess BUT that’s tricky. Basically you have to

• actually find out what’s taking up space (often old kernels) or “just” give up on data temporarily (basically you move your /home, or part of it, to a USB stick) via rescue mode (you need to be familiar with the CLI) or remount the disk on another working system
• get the actually missing packages via another working system then install locally (typically dpkg on .deb files but NOT apt get because that requires connectivity and thus packages you do not have anymore) the bare minimum you need then finish the update.

For me it was on a small temporary system (e.g. RPi for HomeAssistant) so it was basically easier to recover from a recent backup after formatting.

It’s annoying but it’s actually not that bad.

Edit: clarified on the broken state and dpkg vs apt get

Funny I have the opposite experience.

I use KDE Plasma, Firefox, konsole, etc and sometimes, no idea when and why, I just pick a file then drop it somewhere else, including ON the terminal… and it works?! Like it brings the full path for that file and then I can compose with CLI tools, amazing!

I’m quite used to the terminal so I rarely use drag&drop (mv, cp, scp, rsync, etc just work) but when I do I’m actually often positively surprise that totally different software made with different interaction paradigms (e.g. GUI vs CLI) do work well together. Overall I think https://specifications.freedesktop.org/ is quite impressive.