The GUI is here to stay. I understand the power of the commandline, but most
users relate to graphics better than text. The only people who can touch
type any more are secretaries and programmers. Many people can hardly
remember a phone number due to all of the phone books in their devices, let
alone remember complex commands that give you syntax errors if you mistype.
And who likes to repeat themselves any way, by re-typing. Video games and
remote controls changed the way people work forever. People get buttons,
except for my wife -- I hope she isn't reading this :), and icons.
Sure the action happens at a lower level and there is power there, but
nobody buys an expensive computer to look at a terminal except maybe Richard
Stallman. The rest of us want glitz and to see things happen instead of
black on white text scrolling too fast to read. The commandline is only
faster if you know how to use it. It is slower for many people and it is
harder to learn.
I agree with the comment that some distros are niche communities. Arch will
never be big. It is for a certain type of user and I am glad that it works
for them. I get why a user would want to use Gentoo, but I don't get Sabayon
though I have tried many times. It is big and bloated and you lose all of
the advantages of Gentoo. But some users like it, so I am glad that it
exists for those people.
I hope that Linux remains diverse and in that I see strength. If everyone
migrated to Ubuntu then we would all lose. Centralisation means that anybody
wishing to take Linux down has to only concentrate their efforts in one
place. Now they don't know what to make of us. We are a hydra and they don't
know where to start.
I hope that lots of users branch out and try some of the less well known
distros and support these projects with their expertise and donations. I
also think that old users like some of us need to become more flexible in
our thinking. We need to think about not what works for us which is often a
commandline solution, but what will work best for the user which is often a
GUI approach. The problem right now is that much of the expertise is in the
hands of people who are old school and they are trying to communicate to
people who do not relate to it. It is largely a communication problem.
The best manual IMO is the community. You can buy a book and search in the
index and maybe find what you want or you can search the internet and find
most of what you need. All that you need to learn is how to perfect your
search techniques. Most people do not read manuals. We are writing the
manual as we go along and things are changing too quickly to keep it up to
date. Manuals are only an excuse for most people and they need something to
blame for their inability so that you get lame excuses like "I only followed
the manual" or "it is not in the manual". If it wasn't that it would be
something else.
I should not have given up blogging as some of my messages border on one. ;)
Roy
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