On Fri, 2003-01-17 at 13:25, Sander Vesik wrote:
> > As you get to know your system, the power of the shell and the thousands
> > of commands with one for almost anything you need, you inevitably have
> > to know (and care) about /usr, /dev, etc...
>
> Those are not normal users - a normal user just wants to do his everyday
> work (which is not likely to be about computers) and should have no need
> to go to the command line. They don't know what DOS commandline commands
> are and are very unlikely to know the unix ones, so the comand line is of
> no use to them.
I respectfully disagree.
I do that on my everyday work! ;) What's your idea Sander? Comparing DOS
to bash? Sheesh... bash and the multitude of programs usually available
by default give users a power and flexibility beyond their wildest
dreams on Microsoft Software. That way, it's quite understandable that
they prefer a GUI to a command line. DOS sucks. bash & company don't!
I can think of a couple quite simple problems that can easily happen in
life and that's a lot easier to do over the command line:
cd gifs
find . -iname "*.gif" -exec convert \{\} -resize 60% ../pngs/\{\}.png \;
Feel free to add enough arguments to convert so you can clearly see how
it's *way* better.
Imagine convert isn't distribute by default or that there is no .dep or
.rpm, or whatever, so now you have to download, compile and install...
Another example: sending all image names and sizes to someone else:
ls -laF pngs/* | mutt john doe org
Do that in GUI: screenshot (maybe many if it's a ling list) of nautilus
windows, than attach them with your gui mail program (a lot of them
allow only one file at a time to be attached).
The thing is:
not all, or even most, users are dumb
Take the dumb users apart, and you have a large number that maybe
doesn't care.
Well, a large number of people don't care about oxygen and other gasses
that compose what they normally call air either, they just want to
breathe and cut down trees so they have wood for their business :)
Just educate the users, or tomorrow a new and better GUI comes up and
they'll have to learn everything a new (and slowly) because they are not
mentally flexible enough.
Just let's not overdo.
Cheers, Rui
ps: last post on this thread, promise! :)
--
+ No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown
+ Whatever you do will be insignificant,
| but it is very important that you do it -- Gandhi
+ So let's do it...?
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