New user - is incus basically tied to command line use at present?

Are you looking for a gui to manage your vm`s and containers? Its called the web-ui and there is one. If so you might want to look into these threads Web UI for Incus
Enabling the Web UI

You can try it and see if that would help here, Linux Containers - Incus - Try it online
just accept and at the bottom of the introduction there is NEW: You can also try one of the Incus web interfaces!