On Thursday 04 November 2004 22:08, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
No one is going to argue that Linux doesn't have a steep learning curve, it does however level out after a while.
Ease of package installation really depends on what distribution you are using and whether or not you are trying to run on the bleeding edge by compiling packages from source. I would say that every major distribution has at least one user in this group so hopefully your questions won't go unanswered.
With some distributions it is possible to never need to go near the command line (SuSE can sometimes achieve this) However you will quickly learn that the shell is one of Linux's greatest strengths, it is a very flexable tool.
There are many people who have a fundamental fear of / aversion to command lines, having been brought up on Windows or Mac. More than once I've had to convince people that Windows even HAS a command line, possibly because Microsoft bury it so far down the Start menu hierarchy. There's a deep-seated suspicion that Linux represents a move back to DOS and that Linux experts are only grudging users of GUIs in the first place. (Well, there's more than a grain of truth there.)
As you say, some distros are getting close to being fully usable without going near a command line. Depends on what you want to do with them of course, but most of these people rarely need to stray outside KDE, any more than they went looking for the DOS command prompt in Windows.
The point I'm getting to is that although many of us see Linux as rooted in the CLI, with a GUI added later, it's quite OK to reverse it. When people want and need to do something the GUI doesn't offer, they'll then have enough motivation to find out how bash works, and use it as a crowbar to open up the system. It's a new way of introducing people to Linux, but a perfectly good one. That's the beauty of the system; it's all things to all (wo)men.
-- GT