[ubuntu-studio-devel] Elementary OS

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 2 Sep 2015 11:02:12 +0200, Set Hallstrom wrote:
>Sometimes, when my converted friends need help (which is incredibly
>seldom), i send them the terminal command to cut and paste because it's
>faster than writing a how to for the GUI: "open this app, go into that
>menu, click on "magicschwizzle button", browse to the voila-tab, enter
>value "X" under tudulu, click accept, restart program".... Obviously,
>my personal experience has NO relevancy to the majority, but my friends
>always tell me with pride that they fell like a hacker :D And i like
>that. By helping them solve the solution this way, i'm indirectly
>teaching them how the terminal works, what a directory looks like in
>text, and so guiding them to better understand their own computing.

That's my point of view too.

A user needs to know what GUI to use.
A user needs to know how to use the GUI.

It's the same for the terminal.

A user needs to know what command to use.
A user needs to know how to use the command.

It's the same learning curve and for both the same time is needed to
learn it, but only the command line can really provide all that is
needed.

I remember back when I learned to program computers. It was a C64. It's
easier to program Assembler, than to program BASIC. Nothing is more
powerful than Assembler, Assembler is machine code, just the numbers of
the operation code is translated to three letter abbreviations. E.g.
"mov" is for "move", the real op code for "mov" is a hex
number, something like "10" or "ab", but you don't need to know the
cryptic numbers. FWIW "mov" is not used by the C64 CPU, it provides
"ldx" and "stx", for "load" and "store" instead of "move", to "move"
data. It sounds more abstract, so it's daunting, but de facto it's less
abstract than higher languages such as BASIC and much easier to learn
and to use than BASIC, at least for special tasks, sure a "Hello
world!" can be easier written in BASIC.

It's similar for GUI vs command line on Linux. If you want to write an
email to send "Hello world" it's easier to do using a GUI, than e.g.
using nano and msmtp or any other editor without a GUI and sendmail
replacement. If you want to set up an audio workstation, or even restore
an audio session, command line, respl. scripts are much easier to use.

With a script you simply need to launch all apps, then run aj-snashot
to save or restore all connections and if you like you could use
wmctrl to move the launched apps to different workspaces. Nothing gets
lost, nothing will break by updates, no learning curve for the user who
anyway does use the terminal. For GUIs there's always a new learning
curve, each update could break things and many people lost data when
they used session managers.