just a suggestion
 

I'll start by saying that without the answers provided by the people who take the time to
reply in these (and other) forums I would of given up on linux weeks ago.
Without your help I'd have a system with no 3d, no dvd, no mpegs, no P2P etc.etc.Thankyou
very much!
But (with no offence intended) it seems sometimes the answers are sometimes quick
to go running off to the command line. Many of us newbies have a background in
Windows at best. I'm beginning to realize the power of the shell and am determined
to learn to use it, but as an example;
Yesterday I downloaded a tar file (no RPM) from Azureus. Following the instructions
I tried to (untar?) from the command line. Fatal error and some more terms I didn't
recognize. Off to the forums, simular advice with slightly different syntax. Again fatal
error.
Finally out of frustration reverted to the windows method, right clicked, extract here.
App seems to work fine.
So yes, please, list the shell solution, but if there is a method easier for ex-windows
users list that also. Some of us want to use our systems while we learn :)

I admit I usually give info on how to do something in a shell, but then again, not many people say what distro and GUI they're using so it would take some time asking and figuring it out whereas the shell is mostly the same for all distros. If there's errors they are also easy to post from a shell. Besides, not all people who post answers here use kde or gnome and possibly don't even use ark or whatever often enough to remember mentioning it.
I'm not saying that the GUI way to make things work should be ignored, just saying that the one most common denominator for user input in different distros with different GUIs is the shell.

I'd second makuyl's comments.
Also most system components for the Windows OSs are pretty much locked in compiled files, such as executables, library files (dlls) and so on. So, if they go wrong, you normally need to re-install it or a different version. Systems files that you could, maybe, open with a text editor (such as .inf) are also often incomprensible to the average user. The joys of proprietry software...

With Linux the system is open, the are not many 'secrets' (yet), most systems' files are readbale with a regular text editor, and are also well annotated with notes, that you can often figure things out yourself what each bit does - if not what exactly what to edit.

So, I guess the need to put together GUI "fix it" type applications hasn't been as urgent. But with Linux becoming more popular, and accessable to a wider audience, there will be more applications being developed. Just look at the Red Hat Package Management system - I can remember being really put off Linux, because to install something, you had to untar this, ./make that, /configure the other and symbolically link to something else, and if the moon was int he assention of the third house of aquarius, then there would be dependency error...
Now, you just browse to the RPM file in Konqueror (he says inviting the wrath of Gnome users and others...!) double click and 'hey ho off we go'. Then your built in installation application, such as YaST (for SuSE) reports a dependency error...

Thanks for the reminder about the distro information. I've added it to my member info and it should now
appear to the left.
As far as the shells being mostly identical , I moved to Suse after briefly trying Fedora. Even with my limited
command vocabulary some differences have been noticed. I'll assume most of these are minor .
I moved to Suse because I liked GUI nature of Yast. I'll conquer that shell eventually!

most of us simply don't take the time to learn the bewildering ins and outs of all those goofy gui point and click programms.
I don't even have most of them installed because i can't figure out how to use them without a 300 page instruction booklet and 8 wasted weeks of confusion.