linuxgeek: Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Re: LINUX_NEWBIES or TECHNICAL JARGON?

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Re: LINUX_NEWBIES or TECHNICAL JARGON?

On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 10:47:01PM -0400, Roy wrote:

> I hate the commandline. I am a poor typist and as I age my memory for
> remembering the commands and syntax is not what it used to be. It has its
> use, but for the most part you can do without it. If it is commandline, I
> prefer to cut and paste. It saves lots of re-typing.
>
> The problem is that people do not specify when they ask for help. Most of
> the people helping are CLI users. So it is the first thing they think of. If
> you want GUI help say so. Otherwise you will get lots of jargon and things
> that you don't need or want to know.
>

That's a pretty good point. I find, that on Fedora Forums, I can help
less and less. The majority of the folks asking for help are using
Gnome, and I know very little about it. (I'm a fluxbox/openbox fan).

As Linux becomes more mainstream, the GUI tools become more and more
sophisticated. The good part is that it becomes easier for folks to
use, so, from an advocate's standpoint, that's a good thing.

The bad thing, aside from we grouchy elitists mumbling to
ourselves--shucks folks, in the old days, when you set up X, there was a
risk of destroying your monitor if you got your settings wrong--is that
it begins to suffer from the same problems as Windows and Apple. It
begins to tie several system applications, such as network and sound, to
the GUI. If (and this frequently happens in Fedora--don't know about
Ubuntu), you're not able to get to the GUI, it becomes difficult,
especially for the newcomer, to set up networking and sound.

The two abovementioned desktop distros also now do one of the things
that annoys me most about MS/Apple, hiding the bootup info behind cutesy
splash screens. In most cases, this can be circumvented, but to
re-achieve functionality that has always been there, is, in my not so
humble opinion, a regression. They also all aim for quick boots. I
don't think CentOS and probably Ubuntu server, are guilty of this, since
they're more server oriented, where you reboot infrequently, and it's
far more important for it to boot than to boot quickly.

As an example, part of Fedora's speed the boot strategy is to give grub
a default of 0 time out. (And boot into GUI.)

F10, or possibly 11, had a bug when booting with some RAID and SCSI.
You had to add a line to grub to get it to work--the quickest way to do
it, assuming you overlooked the possibility of editing it in the /sys
mount, before the first reboot, was to use a rescue disk to reboot and
then edit it. Otherwise, you hovered like a cat in front of a mouse
hole--well, they don't hover, but same idea--waiting to catch it, to hit
the esc key at exactly the right moment to be able to edit it.

They both go by the premise that they'll always boot and always be able
to boot into GUI, and this can, on the numerous occasions when it
doesn't work, cause problems.

However, I've digressed (as usual) completely. Point is, that as Roy
says, many of the folks do tend to think in command line terms and
solutions. It's simply habit and the way they approach things, but for
the newcomer, it's not always the quickest way.

On the other hand, it is a good thing to know, as it can save you when
the GUI doesn't work properly.

--
Scott Robbins
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