An interesting phenomenon - windows users like the CLI
 

I have often told online friends about linux and sent them links to articles, showed people screenshots, talked about the nice stuff linu has to offer etc. But the general reaction has always been lukewarm. Theres been 1-2 of them that wanted help for running counterstrike servers on linux but thats about it, not many were interested that could do everything windows could.

However, a week ago I was forced to drop back to terminal mode because my dog chewed my mouse. Since it was a weekend I had to wait two days to go buy another mouse. While I had to wait, I looked into ways to make my virtual terminal time a bit more productive/easier/fun. I practiced using Elinks, i found CenterICQ to keep in contact with friends on msn/aim, figured out bitchX and some irc commands, configured pine for email, and even played around with a few games that come with slackware like Go Fish and a dungeons and dragons type of text rpg, etc.

The first time I sent a message to a friend, I was pretty excited. I told the friend that I was using a console based msn program and he wanted to see a screenshot. I found fbshot and installed it. I took a couple screenshots of centericq/elinks/pine and posted them on a forums for a clan I belong to. The reaction was astounding. people were amazed at how sophisticated console apps were. They thought it was great stuff. And the best thing was that several people asked me to help them setup linux on their own computers so they could use terminal apps too.

So maybe next time your group isn't interested, show off linux's powerful CLI. Maybe you'll get a similar reaction :)

"wow thats too sweet"

"the web browser, it can process php, that is class!"

"That beats the h-e-double hockey stick out of the real MSN, thats awesome! "

"This is what computers are about. It was much cooler in movies when you saw those black screens with strange code. Now the movie haxors use Windows..." :p

:D

Yeah, I've been stuck in the CLI before too, but Gentoo spoils you in that area. I had gensplash running, Links with the fb driver and mplayer with the same, it's almost like using X really. There is even a version of GTK for use on the framebuffer and Enlightenment's new Evas library has an fb display engine as well so really, who needs X? ;)

Now whoever said that needs a swift kick in the teeth!

In the same way, showing off Gnome & KDE can often make people say "Great, it's just a slightly different Windows, big deal" whereas showing them Fluxbox or FVWM really gets their attention.

It's great that there's software that a Windows user can be comfortable with, but often it's showing them the stuff that's DIFFERENT that gets them interested.