This is the kind of mindset that prevents mass adoption of Linux. Sure the terminal should be available but there still should be distros catering to less tech-savvy people if we want the year of the Linux desktop to arrive at all. Some governments are looking to replace Windows with Linux, and you cannot expect the average desk worker to know or even care about doing stuff in a terminal.
You don’t need to do everything on the terminal – even today, you don’t have to. But you should not fear the terminal, the same way you should not fear a piano because you play a violin. Windows also has a terminal, there’s stuff that tells you to go there to enable some Powershel things, and no one complains.
Great comparison, because playing either piano or violin is beyond 99% of all people who just want to listen to music. Common users and office workers have never even heard of Powershell.
You should not have to learn for years before being comfortable using a computer. If everyone has to do that it’s not something that will be adopted widely, as we can obviously see with Linux on Desktop. It’s both a Software problem (either lack thereof or bad design) as well as a culture problem; the latter is what I criticize, because it’s so utterly unnecessary and alienates common people.
And the Windows Shell really isn’t comparable, it’s 100% optional.
You don’t need years for a terminal, at least not for the stuff a normal user would have to expect to do with it (so eg.: not browsing files, that has good UIs already). But you should expect to have to learn something. We require people to learn and even certify their learning when they are to drive a car for example, and for computers we are not even askng 1/6th of that, even tho the last few decades show we maybe should.
Learn for years? Dude you just search on the internet if you need to find out how to do something in the terminal that you don’t know how to do. This isn’t the 90s where you had to have a bookshelf of technical manuals to install and run your favorite distro.
Terminal usage is a tool just like GUI tools, I don’t think it’s helpful either to preload people with the belief that it’s some arcane tool that takes years before you can start using it, like anything you pick it up by doing.
Can’t really say it’s 100% optional as a blanket case either, heavily depends on a user, my work I’ve depended on having a terminal for years, and that was even before I moved into SWE, I’ve seen lots of business developed processes put together as an amalgam of batch files, VBA/VBS, and python because they needed to put something together with what they had rights to.
Be honest that I don’t see the terminal as a barrier to Linux anyhow, for the use case of “I browse the internet and use office programs”, you absolutely do not need to drop to the CLI, at least not for Debian or Mint, can handle installs and updates through their graphical package managers. Most people probably aren’t setting up services or the like on their machines, and if they are they already require terminal usage on any operating system.
This is the kind of mindset that prevents mass adoption of Linux. Sure the terminal should be available but there still should be distros catering to less tech-savvy people if we want the year of the Linux desktop to arrive at all. Some governments are looking to replace Windows with Linux, and you cannot expect the average desk worker to know or even care about doing stuff in a terminal.
You don’t need to do everything on the terminal – even today, you don’t have to. But you should not fear the terminal, the same way you should not fear a piano because you play a violin. Windows also has a terminal, there’s stuff that tells you to go there to enable some Powershel things, and no one complains.
Great comparison, because playing either piano or violin is beyond 99% of all people who just want to listen to music. Common users and office workers have never even heard of Powershell.
You should not have to learn for years before being comfortable using a computer. If everyone has to do that it’s not something that will be adopted widely, as we can obviously see with Linux on Desktop. It’s both a Software problem (either lack thereof or bad design) as well as a culture problem; the latter is what I criticize, because it’s so utterly unnecessary and alienates common people.
And the Windows Shell really isn’t comparable, it’s 100% optional.
You don’t need years for a terminal, at least not for the stuff a normal user would have to expect to do with it (so eg.: not browsing files, that has good UIs already). But you should expect to have to learn something. We require people to learn and even certify their learning when they are to drive a car for example, and for computers we are not even askng 1/6th of that, even tho the last few decades show we maybe should.
Learn for years? Dude you just search on the internet if you need to find out how to do something in the terminal that you don’t know how to do. This isn’t the 90s where you had to have a bookshelf of technical manuals to install and run your favorite distro.
Terminal usage is a tool just like GUI tools, I don’t think it’s helpful either to preload people with the belief that it’s some arcane tool that takes years before you can start using it, like anything you pick it up by doing.
Can’t really say it’s 100% optional as a blanket case either, heavily depends on a user, my work I’ve depended on having a terminal for years, and that was even before I moved into SWE, I’ve seen lots of business developed processes put together as an amalgam of batch files, VBA/VBS, and python because they needed to put something together with what they had rights to.
Be honest that I don’t see the terminal as a barrier to Linux anyhow, for the use case of “I browse the internet and use office programs”, you absolutely do not need to drop to the CLI, at least not for Debian or Mint, can handle installs and updates through their graphical package managers. Most people probably aren’t setting up services or the like on their machines, and if they are they already require terminal usage on any operating system.