downloadsquad.com — The command line. It strikes fear in the hearts of many a new Linux user. They open their terminals reluctantly, and there the prompt sits, with the cursor blinking in rhythm with their racing hearts... All right, so maybe it's not horror movie material. But it is intimidating for many new users.
Jan 17, 2008 View in Crawl 4
toadxJan 18, 2008
You don't really know anything about Linux unless you know how to use the terminal. If you only know how to use the GUI that comes with common distributions such as Ubuntu, then you only know how to use the Gnome or KDE interface.The Gnome and KDE GUI's don't even have to run under Linux; they can be easily run in just about any POSIX compliant OSes such as Solaris. You could easily have a Gnome user interface that looks like Ubuntu's but isn't running on Linux at all.You can't claim you know anything about Linux if you only use the GUI. Soon enough we'll have all Mac OS X users claiming they know UNIX.
mweatherJan 18, 2008
Linux wasn't created as a free alternative to expensive unixes. There already were free alternatives. Ever heard of BSD, or Minix for that matter?And no OS was designed to make programming easy. OSes are designed for running programs, not writing them.
yatoobinJan 18, 2008
just fsck it!
myztryJan 19, 2008
There is nothing hard about using a well written command line interface. Back '88 I spent a lot of my time in the CLI on the Amiga (and others) because written commands were simply the best way to achieve many tasks. The commands were logical and powerful, the switches were intuitive in name and function. The wildcard system was amazing. Redirection (piping) could be done to any device. It was really well implemented. Accessible to all.Though I'm a full time Ubuntu user, I have to admit the Linux command line is obscure at best. A major obstacle with Linux is that the Linux culture went through a period of obfuscation (hidden meaning) obsession. And it's shows in the non-intuitive nature of the shell commands. Rarely do switches line up with the abbreviated letter of a logically named purpose. Devices are implemented as long obscure named nested file structure references. Sure Linux kicks ass over Windows, but it's hardly the ultimate implementation. And the man (manual) pages are laid out like they were written by a government bureaucrat. Being better doesn't implicitly make something the best.My 2cents.
init100Jan 19, 2008
I actually prefer using the same size prefix (usually -k, which means use kB) for all partitions. That makes it easy to spot differences in size quickly, as 10 is very different from 10000, while with -h one becomes 10k and the other becomes 10M.
zootmJan 19, 2008
> Yet learning the basic functionality of the stuff behind the GUI is beneficial to anybody on any platform.Do you really think so? I imagine it's useful to techies, but for people who aren't interested in that sort of thing it'll be an exercise in completely unnecessary frustration.> I wouldn't quite call it the equivalent of learning to use the DOS prompt in Windows, because that's not the foundation of Windows...Interestingly I think from the next version onwards, the PowerShell interfaces to things on the Server versions of Windows are meant to be the foundation; the UI elements just script them. It's a neat turnabout for MS.> Knowing at least a little about them is very useful to even the beginner, particularly when there is no one unified GUI for linux.I disagree. And I don't think there's any particular disadvantage to tying users to a single UI, unless they actively want to change it, either. People who have Ubuntu should only need to know how to use Gnome, and that's the world they're in.