this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Hot take (lemmy.ml)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 137 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Not a hot take at all. Asking someone to go from a GUI heavy operating system to a command line heavy one and be just as productive is lunacy. Like all major changes it is important to ween off the old thing.

My biggest hurdle with the switch has been permission related issues, and you can't deal with those cleanly with a UI, and every help thread under the sun throws out a bunch of command line commands giving a solution without explaining why those changes are needed. It may seem like Unix 101 to experienced Linux users, but it is really cryptic to newcomers coming from operating systems that are...cough more lenient with their permissions.

There is also a mentality that UIs are much more idiot proof than command line. UIs are written by people who actually know the OS so we can't accidentally delete our home folder because of a typo. It is a very legitimate concern.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Yesterday morning i installed Mint xfce on an old laptop.

I wanted to install synaptics drivers for the touchpad because i use the trackball as mouse but need the touchpad for clicking. Something that isnt configureable in the default driver.

When i copied an example config file and added my line, i rebooted the computer.

The GUI broke because in the example config file, there were "..." To indicate writing further options, but xorg couldnt interpret or ignore it, so i had to figure out how to edit textfiles in the command line.

No fun times, and definetely a risk for new users.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 10 months ago (1 children)

This story is literally every experienced Linux users first horror story.

I still remember the first time I broke my xorg config on my shiny new slackware 10 install in early 2005.

[–] TerminalLover 15 points 10 months ago

It's so common there's an XKCD about it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

I agree, BUT that is only because the average windows user never even had to bother with permission. I find permissions on Linux A LOT easier to handle than on Windows. Basically the way Windows does permissions is garbage, so they made it so that people can just do whatever so they won't complain about permissions. That is... one way of doing things, I guess.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Not really, the vaaaast majority of PC users don't need the linux commandline.