This whole threat is a HUGE circle jerk and a collection of all the “I USE ARCH BTW” variations imaginable.
“WHY WOULDN’T ALL PEOPLE WANT THE KNOWLEDGE TO CRAFT COMMANDS TO MANIPULATE, FILTER AND SEARCH TEXT IN A WHOLE FILE SYSTEM WITH JUST ONE COMMAND? UNCULTURED PESANTS”
Come, not everyone is a computer nerd, nor everyone ones to optimize 30s in the workflow if it means memorizing a bunch of commands, their syntax and options.
If you want to use Linux without the terminal nowadays it’s pretty easy. But also I think the fear of the terminal is part of the culture that consumer electronics have cultivated where people don’t know (or want to know) how their systems work.
If you take the time to use it, not only can you save yourself time, but also learn a lot more about how you can fix things when they go wrong! That kind of knowledge gives you so much more ownership of your system, because you don’t have to rely on your manufacturer to solve problems for you.
Same for Mac and Windows too, the terminal is something that shouldn’t be necessary, but when it is it helps to know what you’re doing. :)
Do you know how everything in your house works? How to repair everything? No right?
Would you be brave enough to mess with the grounding of your house, or the AC or the heaters, the washing machine, the doors? Not eveyone wants mess with every (subsystem) thing in their house/live"
Most of the people I know want their PC to work and if somwthing goes wrong they just send it to repair or ask somebody else to fix it, they don’t wanna do it themselves, which I find normal, they have little to no interesting in PCs, and that is compleatly fine.
And before someone says "Yeah, but the computer won’t kill you if you fuck up the fixing or messing, let me tell you, a “sudo rm -r” or “sudo chown -R” can fuck you system BAR, making you loose important data and info.
-…But refugee -I hear you about to type-, they SHOULD have 10921 back-ups in atleast 2542 independent locations. Yo, they don’t wanna even see the terminal, and you want them to interest themselves for data integrity and redundacy? Come on.
I didn’t say you have to know everything, just like I don’t know everything in my house and how it works, but I do know how to do basic repairs so I don’t pay loads of money for a guy to come and unclog a drain. I know how to reset my circuit breakers, how to change a fuse, how to change a lightbulb.
That’s what the terminal is. No one here is telling you to write a bootloader in assembly or meticulously study kernel environment parameters. No one advocating for basic knowledge of a terminal likely has knowledge on subnet masks, compilers, or other low level systems that a modern Linux abstracts for you.
But! I know how to update my packages from a terminal. I know how to install a package outside of a repository, or one that’s not listed on my graphical package manager. I know how to export an environment variable to get my software to work how it should.
That’s what “knowing the terminal” gives you. It’s a basic skill that unlocks you from being a mere “user” of a system to an owner of a system. I don’t think everyone will ever need the terminal, but there are people who are replying to me that seem to have a genuine fear that people have knowledge of their computers in a meaningful way.
Knowledge is autonomy for whatever you do, and there’s a reason why the most profitable of systems are the very systems that are locked down abstracted and “user friendly” in all ways that harm a user’s rights and freedoms.
I’ll coincide with you in that first-aid-quick-repairs is something people should in the best of cases know how to do, but setting a envirental variable or installing a package is not a “simple thing”. I’ve worked with engineers that programmed math models for a living that had no idea what a enviromental varible even was. Yes is easy to do, but the concept behind it, what it is, what it does and why are not simple, without the right background or the will to learn about the topic.
And, about user and owner. Sure, I get your point and personally I share it. But again, that is an opinion, tell a non-interested-user that they don’t really own their rig until they know how to use the terminal and I assure you that most of them will disagree.
I think not everyone needs to know how their device works. Specialization is what advances us as humans after all. If they wanted to know, good for them, and if they don’t also good for them. If I were using a car, I don’t need to know how the engine convert a chemical energy, transfer power, and generate thrust
Edit just to give an example, an office worker may only need to use a word processor and their OS be up to date. If the user can just click the GUI to update the OS rather than typing the command for whatever package manager the OS uses, it is good enough for him. Sysadmin can give them the instruction once and done.
If the user forgot the instruction, they can explore it on their own with GUI without internet since no matter how deep a GUI config is, then there must be a way to get there (assuming the UI designer isn’t shit). Contrast that with CLI where if you forgot or don’t know any command there is little help or indicator of what’s available and what can be done without external help.
Contrast that with CLI where if you forgot or don’t know any command there is little help or indicator of what’s available and what can be done without external help.
And how does the user suppose to know to type man? He may remember the instructions to check man, but he may not. For us, those 3 letter words are very familiar, but others need time to remember them. On GUI, this is no problem because as I stated they will bound to find it by exploring. Basically point and click adventure games I guess rather than the guessing game. And users will choose the path they most familiar first.
This whole threat is a HUGE circle jerk and a collection of all the “I USE ARCH BTW” variations imaginable.
“WHY WOULDN’T ALL PEOPLE WANT THE KNOWLEDGE TO CRAFT COMMANDS TO MANIPULATE, FILTER AND SEARCH TEXT IN A WHOLE FILE SYSTEM WITH JUST ONE COMMAND? UNCULTURED PESANTS”
Come, not everyone is a computer nerd, nor everyone ones to optimize 30s in the workflow if it means memorizing a bunch of commands, their syntax and options.
If you want to use Linux without the terminal nowadays it’s pretty easy. But also I think the fear of the terminal is part of the culture that consumer electronics have cultivated where people don’t know (or want to know) how their systems work.
If you take the time to use it, not only can you save yourself time, but also learn a lot more about how you can fix things when they go wrong! That kind of knowledge gives you so much more ownership of your system, because you don’t have to rely on your manufacturer to solve problems for you.
Same for Mac and Windows too, the terminal is something that shouldn’t be necessary, but when it is it helps to know what you’re doing. :)
Do you know how everything in your house works? How to repair everything? No right?
Would you be brave enough to mess with the grounding of your house, or the AC or the heaters, the washing machine, the doors? Not eveyone wants mess with every (subsystem) thing in their house/live"
Most of the people I know want their PC to work and if somwthing goes wrong they just send it to repair or ask somebody else to fix it, they don’t wanna do it themselves, which I find normal, they have little to no interesting in PCs, and that is compleatly fine.
And before someone says "Yeah, but the computer won’t kill you if you fuck up the fixing or messing, let me tell you, a “sudo rm -r” or “sudo chown -R” can fuck you system BAR, making you loose important data and info.
-…But refugee -I hear you about to type-, they SHOULD have 10921 back-ups in atleast 2542 independent locations. Yo, they don’t wanna even see the terminal, and you want them to interest themselves for data integrity and redundacy? Come on.
I didn’t say you have to know everything, just like I don’t know everything in my house and how it works, but I do know how to do basic repairs so I don’t pay loads of money for a guy to come and unclog a drain. I know how to reset my circuit breakers, how to change a fuse, how to change a lightbulb.
That’s what the terminal is. No one here is telling you to write a bootloader in assembly or meticulously study kernel environment parameters. No one advocating for basic knowledge of a terminal likely has knowledge on subnet masks, compilers, or other low level systems that a modern Linux abstracts for you.
But! I know how to update my packages from a terminal. I know how to install a package outside of a repository, or one that’s not listed on my graphical package manager. I know how to export an environment variable to get my software to work how it should.
That’s what “knowing the terminal” gives you. It’s a basic skill that unlocks you from being a mere “user” of a system to an owner of a system. I don’t think everyone will ever need the terminal, but there are people who are replying to me that seem to have a genuine fear that people have knowledge of their computers in a meaningful way.
Knowledge is autonomy for whatever you do, and there’s a reason why the most profitable of systems are the very systems that are locked down abstracted and “user friendly” in all ways that harm a user’s rights and freedoms.
I’ll coincide with you in that first-aid-quick-repairs is something people should in the best of cases know how to do, but setting a envirental variable or installing a package is not a “simple thing”. I’ve worked with engineers that programmed math models for a living that had no idea what a enviromental varible even was. Yes is easy to do, but the concept behind it, what it is, what it does and why are not simple, without the right background or the will to learn about the topic.
And, about user and owner. Sure, I get your point and personally I share it. But again, that is an opinion, tell a non-interested-user that they don’t really own their rig until they know how to use the terminal and I assure you that most of them will disagree.
I think not everyone needs to know how their device works. Specialization is what advances us as humans after all. If they wanted to know, good for them, and if they don’t also good for them. If I were using a car, I don’t need to know how the engine convert a chemical energy, transfer power, and generate thrust
Edit just to give an example, an office worker may only need to use a word processor and their OS be up to date. If the user can just click the GUI to update the OS rather than typing the command for whatever package manager the OS uses, it is good enough for him. Sysadmin can give them the instruction once and done.
If the user forgot the instruction, they can explore it on their own with GUI without internet since no matter how deep a GUI config is, then there must be a way to get there (assuming the UI designer isn’t shit). Contrast that with CLI where if you forgot or don’t know any command there is little help or indicator of what’s available and what can be done without external help.
man
would like to have words with your strawman.And how does the user suppose to know to type
man
? He may remember the instructions to check man, but he may not. For us, those 3 letter words are very familiar, but others need time to remember them. On GUI, this is no problem because as I stated they will bound to find it by exploring. Basically point and click adventure games I guess rather than the guessing game. And users will choose the path they most familiar first.You don’t need man, just type the command with no arguments and you’ll get the help message.