Hi there myluggers, First let me tell you that I really liked the mylug meeting two weeks ago. I think our discussion was good. Did the guy from the college get back to you? Thaths, thanks for sending around this article. Only today I found the time to actually read it.
To be honest I found that the author of this article is not quite getting the point. Being a long time gui user myself I obviously found the command line a bit strange at the beginning of employing Linux. Actually I did not use it at the beginning too often since I was running Mandrake. I am sure that the fear of using a command line will keep some people from migrating to Linux. However I came quickly to the point where one WANTS to use the command line in some circumstances. However I think that there has a lot more to be done with Linux than just removing the command line commands and establishing point and click alternatives to them. The command line comes in handy sometimes even to newbie users and it is no wonder that you have command lines also with windows and mac os. I think that what we discussed was far more relevant: removing choices, less abbreviations as well as better howtos. Most of my frustrations with Linux comes in when I want to fix a problem and after reading have a howto I come over a point where knowledge has to be employed which I simply do not have. I have to get another howto to find out the missing bits. This often gets nested to a point where I frustratedly give up being annoyed that I spent three hours haveing learned some bits but did not solve my problem. This happened also in Windows environment, however one does not touch that point so often. Since a couple of months I now use gentoo. Often it is referred to as an advanced distribution. And indeed one has to type in commands manually. However the installation guide is written step by step that at the end of the whole thing people have their OS runnung AND have the impression that they learned a lot. A very satisfying experience for one is willing to spend some extra time since one has the impression to have control over what one is doing. I do not want to start promoting gentoo here. Indeed I think about swaping to ubuntu. But I want to make the point that using acommand line is not the most difficult thing in the world. There are far more difficult things in a gui environment. It is just that one does not come to these points too often. Cheeni talked about hating Linux becoming mainstream due to what it does to the community. Any idea what he meant? Hope you all do fine. Best, Bernhard
