Comment on Should I or should I not use/bother with using Linux? (READ THE WHOLE POST)
linearchaos@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoI maintain a cluster of hundreds of linux boxes professionally. I run NixOS, Debian, Ubuntu and Centos currently and I’m ultimately familiar with all but Nix, as I’ve only been running it for six months. I’ve been Linux on the desktop for most of time since about 2003, all of my installs are up to date.
Someone who’s solidly averse to the terminal is going to be in for a surprise the first time a kernel update breaks Nvidia, or if they decide to dual boot and MS breaks grub. The existing GUI management situation is a bare minimum skeletons or undocumented clutter. He’s looking for a control panel not kate wrapped into a list of files.
The worst part is any support he’s looking for isn’t going to mention crap about whatever bolt on GUI he’s trying to use. All the support out there is run this command, run that command, cat | cut | xargs, check service status with this, check logs with that.
I’ve never known anyone even marginally advanced in Linux that doesn’t have a strong grasp of the terminal and their way around bash. They all go back to Windows/Mac.
I’ll stick with my suggestion that Linux is not for anyone with a strong aversion to terminals. I don’t think that’s out of date what-so-ever.
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I definitely understand where you’re coming from, but at this point I’ve had so many JustWorks™️ Linux systems, including set up on my parents’ PC for well over 5 years without one single problem or breaking update, and they certainly are never opening up the terminal.
My experience tells me that this is just objectively wrong, or I’d be getting calls from my parents, HOWEVER, I will concede that maybe this is only wrong if you just want a bulletproof system that works without messing around much.
If OP wants to mess around and get dirty in settings, then I’ll give it to you that they might need to be a bit more open minded about the terminal. I haven’t really tried much GUI configs or settings besides really common, typical stuff, like network config or power saving modes/settings, because I just go right to the terminal regardless.
But its just wrong to claim that someone who doesn’t want to use a terminal will have a problem on Linux, it just depends heavily on what you are trying to do. For the tasks that most people use a personal computer for, there won’t be anything holding you back.