I completely reject this premise. GUI is built on top of command line tools. It introduces another layer of potential failures, issues, unexpected behaviors, and limitations.
Being uncomfortable with CLI is not a valid excuse, ever. You can damage the system via GUi just as easily, and often, without knowing.
It’s a curios experiment — to see if you can bend the system to your will using limiting and coarse GUI, but it’s not a viable way forward. Especially so with a synology, where any step into any direction but along the most straightforward configuration leads to guaranteed failure.
- “But it worked for me!” Does not matter. You are probably still on that one tested path.
- “But synology says changing system via CLI is unsupported!” I could not care less what they think. Let alone what they want me to think.
CLI is not scary or difficult. It’s much simpler and easier , only takes getting used to. The same way you got used to GUI. GUI has, albeit often broken, help. CLI has excellent built in help, always. Every single tool comes with extensive documentation or at least command line parameters usage with examples.
Figure out how to do things that way. It will save you massive amount of time. You will accumulate scripts, helpers, and automation naturally over time, something that is impossible with GUi, and won’t depend on a will of underpaid interns developing horrible synology GUI apps on what you can and cannot do with the system.
This applies to TrueNAS users as well. All configuration is doable via mdcli/mdclt — providing path to automation and reuse. Even though TrieNAS web UI is already ten times better than Synology’s bloated garbage, command line tooling is unbeatable.
So reject that learned helplessness and interact with your systems in a full, unrestricted by artificial nonsens, way.
Don’t be afraid to break things. You will break them anyway. You will restore from backup if you do. You still need and have a backup, don’t you? So fear of breaking the system is irrelevant as well.