Proposal for additional pre-installed apps - Please consider those (txt)

[Tiger]

sorry, again as plain text

Hello Team,

triggered by the email from Yousuf Philips "Proposal for additional pre-installed apps" in "xubuntu-devel Digest, Vol 174, Issue 9" from Sat 14,2020  I feel I can contribute something.

TLDR;
Please consider adding
1. ne          - because its intuitive for former Windows users and Linux GUI users as most stuff works as in GUI
2. cifs-utils  - should be apt installable from install media to get access to NW shares. Important for offline installs
3. mc          - because it helps CLI newbies to get around in the FS. Helps Windows power users to feel home (as Norton Commander)


Longversion:

I am grateful for Xubuntu which had allowed me to move away from Windows 3 years ago and I the only thing I have ever regreted was that I did not start earlier. I have an admin perspective from running several servers and having installed well over 100 clients, but still I feel as a change-over guy from the windows world and I am aware of the many things that make Linux difficult to understand.
My interest is to make it as easy as possible for other people to move from windows to Xubuntu. I think my proposal can help there.

The following three small tools I *heavily* miss on each fresh installation, so I would like to propose them for being considered as standard include on the installation medium. I think its more than personal preference, so please bear with my rather long reasoning.


1. ne
the #1 hurdle to any windows user or IDE used developer are the standard command line editors in Linux. I grew deeply frustrated with vi, vim, emacs, nano etc. that I checked out all I could find. The only one that I could use intuitively as windows user was "ne - the nice editor". I proposed this a few years ago in some forums not knowing where to go with my proposal. The power features of ne from the point of view of a novice users are the standard function that can be used the same way as in the gui tools. Thus, using it will also make it easier for beginners to get acquainted to the command line. Still today I am only using 5% of the capabilities of the editor and but theses are intuitive, to here are my arguments for including it in the default set:
 CTRL-Q   gets you out of the editor
 CTRL-S   saves your text
 CTRL-C   copies text
 CTRK-V   pasts text
 CTRL-X   deletes text
 standard cursor and keyboard   work as expected
 There is a menu to get oriented. I even has a great help file.
 ESC      get you out of anything weird
The only thing which must be explained to the normal user is 'marking'. This is done in an marking mode started with CTRL-B and ended with ESC, CTRL-X/C/V. The marking mode is invisible. The developers say an implementation of a standard marking with SHIFT is technically challenging in the CLI environment.

2. cifs-utils
Use case: install a new PC and connect it to a network share, e.g. a NAS. Not having cifs-utils excludes any network hardware that is based on samba shares - which imho is every network that must be also accessible by Windows PCs. There is no need to have it pre-installed, but it should be install-able by apt.

3. mc
Midnight commander is the tool to quickly get around. For novices its a great thing to explore the CLI world. For experts its great for copying stuff from more deeply nested structures, e.g. from NAS shares. For me its still the quickest way to modify several setup files or check for application log files, because with 2 F3 key strokes one can look into a config file and even edit it with a F4 key stroke. Whenever I investigate something I am not sure how it works E.g. is a tool in /use/lib, /usr/share/lib, /opt/lib,... or what is in /var/www/html and subdirs? I have not seen anything more efficient for checking out directories on the CLI yet. Bonus: the same tool is known to any windows power user from Norton Commander.

Thanks for considering
Tiger


>Disk Management
 +1

 PS: for the Live version a tool to give a hardware overview would be helpful for Support/Maintenance/Debugging work. I am installing "hardinfo" on every PC, but there might be others.