>>9517
The problem isn't with GUIs inherently, it's with the degeneration of software in general. And really, it goes beyond that, it's everything, all culture on this planet. Also, there is the problem that in some ways, Unix systems shove updates down people's throats even more than Windows does. It's the ultimate updooter OS family. You can't just not update individual programs, that's mostly not a thing, because dependencies being updated will break them (while also making everything worse in some cases, like with each version of GTK being worse than the previous version), and there's no backwards compatibility. So, you don't even get the option of using older and more efficient GUI programs in a lot of cases, unless you don't update at all.
You can get around that by just giving up and using 70s software, but that doesn't solve the problem. Hell, it makes it worse by lowering standards even more. You don't really see actual good GUI programs being made today (other than older programs that probably got slightly worse but are still fine), for the most part. Everything is either 70s software made by people that don't even try to design a UI (while still using multiple times more RAM than the entirety of Windows 95) or a slow piece of shit written in Python. Computing is basically dead.
Maybe you can get some DOS-style software like Midnight Commander. Even that's a lot more advanced than most Unix software (made by people that have a considerably higher than 0% chance of using ed just to take their YouTube-inspired "minimalist" LARP to the limit, while still using more system resources than old GUI programs), just by having an actual user interface at all (while still having commands, which is nice). It's so bad that if you can get away with it, you might as well just run DOS programs using dosemu2. Maybe run an offline Windows XP VM and share windows from that.
There's also Emacs. Probably the best program in existence, despite being slow, unstable, broken, janky, and generally a huge pile of almost 40 years' worth of bad design decisions and compromises.