On Sunday June 26 2005 12:35, Will Hill wrote:
> Distributions like Mepis and Xandros use KDE and their own GUI to do the same 
> thing for many of the same services.  The problem then becomes navigating the 
> GUI to find the magic box.  Some people are better at this than they are with 
> magic words.  There's no need to condem people to XP.  Free software does the 
> same thing with greater transparency.  Calling people XP lusers because they  
> don't use ifconig regularly, might be interpreted as a flame.

I wasn't trying to condemn people to XP, I was trying to make a point that most 
things should work easily.  Command line interfaces are not very friendly for 
the average user, however many people (including me) find it much more 
efficient to use CLI to do normal tasks.  There have been many advances in the 
desktop linux market to do those tasks with a GUI, but I honestly haven't 
gotten around to playing with those distros.
For the record, I don't use ifconfig regularly, and need a man page whenever I 
do.  My init scripts handle that for me, and I used slack's setup programs to 
do that for me some time ago.  

Someone who needs to start and stop a mail server, name server, sql server, 
etc. is not a normal user, so CLI could be ok for them.   I also agreed with 
the parent email that the network stuff in BSD style inits needs work, since it 
is not friendly even to "power users", much less a normal user that is testing 
a desktop linux distro to see if they want to make the switch.

> 
> Are we grumpy today?

No, not grumpy, just trying to ask a question, and I perhaps chose my words 
without thinking through them as much as I should have.  And now I'm simply 
trying to back out of a corner that I got myself into :-)

-- 
Thanks,
Fernando Vilas
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

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