Linux without a CLI? Good luck with that
2007 June 25
It’s funny when someone comes up to you on the showfloor and *makes* you taste the soup. For me, today, it was this question: “Can you show me how to remove packages without using the command line?” So I brought up Pirut on Fedora 7, and because I didn’t have network, it wouldn’t even load. “No networking? No package list. Sorry.” And when I tried it on RHEL5, it took me about 5 minutes of staring at the GUI to realize that unchecking a box removes a package.“Yeah, yeah,” my inquisitor said to me. “You don’t even notice, I know, because you would go the command-line to remove a package. But my typical user is a science teacher who became the technology coordinator for her high school. And I’m sorry to tell you this, but she will never bring up a command line, ever.” He then challenged me to manage my system for a month without using the CLI at all.
Not to say that I’m not grateful for all the work that’s been done to make Linux more usable (well, I actually can’t say I care that much about helping other people use Linux, except inasmuch as more people using it equates to more vendors supporting Linux), and not to say there haven’t been great strides in Linux usability just over the past couple of years. But when my S.O. says she might boot the FC6 install on her laptop instead of Vista sometime, I basically told her “don’t bother.” For now, at least.
(And please, no comments to the tune of, “but this works great in Debian/Ubuntu/SuSE/Mandriva/Gentoo/Slackware/Windows/OS X/VMS/DR-DOS.”)
