Ideally we'd have the equivalent of an ipython notebook for the terminal. But GUI on Unix is still an unsolved question with more and more incompatible implementations being written daily, so I'm not holding my breath. After using Linux for over 20 years now, I've concluded that if you want a desktop OS, use Windows. If you use Linux, learn to live in the terminal - it's the only consistently working piece of the OS, everything else is consistently broken.