CLI vs GUI opinions

[tofaz]

Hi All,

This post is mainly aimed to understand why the OPNsense userbase has chosen OPNsense rather than using a stock FreeBSD/OpenBSD install with pf managed by the CLI.

I come from a stock FreeBSD+pf+unbound+dhcpd setup since years and the main reason I wanted to move to a GUI was the fact that after a while that I was not logging into it I was going to forget commands and how to do things, and so I was always landing on google/personal notes to remember how to do it. Also the fact that I have a complete dashboard with the current overall status of the appliance gives me more quick awareness of what's passing through my firewall, instead of executing single commands to retrieve isolated information (i.e. top, pftop, systat queues, etc).

What I found online is that many users have the same common reason of not wanting to run a webserver+php on their appliances for security reason, and the fact that via CLI you have more control and learn more.