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Comment by nazgulsenpai | Hacker News Reader

I have been doing this my entire career. IMO its always been much easier to tell someone to hold the Win key and press R and enter a short command than it is to guide them through the UI to whatever setting needs interacting with, especially over the phone.

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All Linux users have known that forever... Also you can email a command to copy and paste into a terminal, try emailing a procedure like "open app X, click button Y, type Z in field W..."

Some of the people I work with don’t understand cmd/posh syntax. Additionally they are often working with air gapped systems, so copy paste is not really an option. Those 2 things make it really difficult to have someone do something by cli only, especially if it’s relatively complex command (pipes, regex, vars)

If you ever end up talking to Microsoft tier 2 support they'll do almost everything through PowerShell.

Which I think hints at the problem. Internally, Microsoft must not be dogfooding (or is it dogfeeding?) their GUI. It's an over-correction from the time when Windows was criticized for being too reliant on visual tools for administration and devs asked for better automation. Well, now scripting is the preferred way to interact with the OS and the GUI plays second fiddle.

There’s actually new functionality that has been specifically designed with no GUI on purpose. Do a google of split brain DNS. The only way to set it up is by creating additional DNS zones and creating DNS query filters. Can only be done in posh. There are other examples of that too, but I’ve had to implement split brain before so I know that one for a fact.

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