Motivated by an exchange in another thread....

We often hear that new Linux users arriving from the Windows world are--or might be--put off by the need to learn the CLI. By implication, those of us that try to promote Linux are being counseled to show people how they can get all their work done thru the GUI.

I have a different perspective: A good CLI is a valuable tool--one that has slowly been taken away from us by the Redmond marketing machine. When the IBM PC brought personal computing into the mainstream, users learned the CLI. For most, it was not a big challenge--you just did it as part of your regular routine.

In this era, I was amoung the deprived. Rather than go with the flow, I bought a 128K Mac---CLI? What's that? For years, I lived a sheltered life, while simultaneously being quietly jealous of all the "real" users who could write DOS scripts.

Cut to the chase: Where we are now with Linux is a powerful combination of good GUI tools and a REALLY good cli. We should promote the power and the intelligent use of all the tools. We should not attempt to protect the Windows refugees from learning new things.

I agree. As a matter of fact, my wife, who knows nothing about computing, asked me last week to show her "this thing that I did" in the terminal window to unzip a dozen of ZIP files in one go (a for loop).

She saw that opening/extracting/closing each ZIP with the GUI was long, while doing so on the command line took a couple of seconds.

In short, I think that we should not hide the CLI.
However, I'm convinced that it's better to let users come to it out of interest (with a little push from us through good show-offs) rather than trying to convince them of how good CLI is in theory.

Yves.

I think the problem lies with people being on the other side of the technical divide: "It (windows) works, so why do I have to switch and have to learn new things?" It's just that a lot of people, even though are p* off at microsoft, would more easily switch to Mac, because it would require less new things. I think that a guide to basic things in the CLI would really help users switch. It's not that the knowledge isn't there, it's just that the average user won't go through the trouble to find it.

The command line is more powerful and more versatile than the GUI. It also has a much steeper learning curve. Sit your 'average' computer user in front of K3b and he/she can burn a CD. Sit him/her in front of the CLI and say 'use cdrecord' and it'll be a while, even if they are already familiar with manpages and everything else.

Some Linux users use ONLY the command line, but I don't feel that's reasonable for desktop usage. I know I always have a terminal open, and usually it's 3-4 tabs.