UNIX, the ancestor of LINUX was a command line operating system that supported only textual commands to operate computer systems. In spite of these limitations UNIX is still considered as the most popular operating system due to its distribution and support base as well as due to its reliable architecture. Linus Torvalds, the inventor of Linux, made a cloned version of UNIX and called it LINUX. The initial version of LINUX was very minimal with a LINUX Kernal and the command line interface “bash”, update utility for flushing the file streams and GCC a compiler. Linus published his operating system on the internet and made it available as a free resource, a decision which was considered stupid by the high end software companies. However in recent years several big organizations have implemented LINUX due to the dependable and secure architecture.
Since 1970s most companies strived in developing their user interfaces to introduce better usability. In the same context later variations of LINUX also supported Graphical User Interfaces that were easier to be used than CLI and was a need of time to be competitive and user oriented.
The paper will discuss the GUI transformation and variations of Linux available and their usability scenarios. The paper will also argument in favor of how GUI can enable usability and simplified managing and administrating the operating system.
User interfaces provide the users medium to interact with the operating systems to manipulate and process various operations. While command line interfaces are considered to be suitable to complex actions where the user might need to repeat, automate and operate several objects simultaneously. CLIs enable users to chain together commands to extend the functionality of the commands and scripts that is impossible to achieve through a graphical user interface.
