Dan Hatton dan.hatton@btinternet.com wrote:
[...] non-GUI solutions for end user problems, when you ask in ALUG, is that the people answering have a personal preference for command-line/text config solutions [...]
I'm not sure that's the whole story. Other reasons are: 1. Easier to explain "comment out line saying foo in file bar" than "move mouse to this, click that, set foo and click OK" in text email and we don't always have time to lovingly prepare web pages with screenshots for list queries. 2. Often people asking questions don't even say which GUI they use... Mandrake has a control centre, Gnome has one, GNUstep has Preferences.app and so on. Nothing wrong with that -- it just takes some getting used to. (Debian's reportbug tool adds some info automatically because of this sort of problem.) 3. Even if they do, they're more likely to find someone who knows the underlying solution by text files rather than their particular GUI and so say that. Nothing wrong with that -- it's just an indication of ALUG's age and that the text files have been around longer. 4. ...and sometimes the question is a too specific "how do I do X in app Y" when they really mean "how do others do task X".
(or vice versa,) don't hold back, post your version as an alternative.
Oh yes, the more ways to skin the moggies the better.