GUI's have increased productivity. How simply because instead of paying one UNIX guru to do it in 20 years, you can have 20 people do it in one.
That's a very bold claim! GUIs are only very good at one thing, suggesting context to the user. This is the case when the user does not have a very good idea what he wants to accomplish or how to accomplish it. For example, think on browsing the internet.
CLIs are very powerful and orders of magnitude faster than GUIs when you have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish and a slight idea on how to accomplish it. This is the case when you are programming, it is the case when you are administrating systems, etc..
Most importantly, CLI allows you to batch repetitive tasks, which doing over a GUI would be time consuming.
I remember seeing some colleagues from my first years of University that used to leave a scientific program running, copy the results into excel once finished, change some parameters in the program, run it again, copy the results into excel.... they did this over 20 times!!!!
People that know better just write a couple of lines in bash and go waste their time with something else, while the bash script re-run the program with different parameters and dump the results somewhere for a final pass. Clearly you are not very comfortable with CLIs, otherwise you would acknowledge how powerful they are!
The GUI interface and touchscreen interface is quick and easy. Mcdonalds, Dunkin Donuts, fast food, Heck that chain restaurant down the street are all having massive increases in possibly productivity because Touchscreens and GUI's make the employees have to push less buttons to get more consistent orders.
Agreed. But would a touchscreen+ GUI fit a programmer? What about someone doing CAD? My point is that different jobs need different tools. A programmer needs a keyboard +CLI while someone doing CAD needs a GUI+CLI + a very precise input like a mouse and/or stylus.
That's why I think the idea behind Metro and Gnome 2 is simply retarded. You cannot have a single user interface accepting for multiple input devices and working to perform different kinds of jobs. Each job requires a different tool!
I would love to see you take my order at a restaurant with a command-line interface.
LOL What do you think cash registers and calculators are exactly? Just because the commands are only composed of numerical digits it does not mean they are not a command line interface.
Also, try using your shiny touchscreen + GUI in a warehouse with thousands of products and let me know how good it is.