http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/21521
The Command Line is Part of the Desktop!
--Unfortunately until now I have been very much a Putzbuntu. But I'm trying to change that.
But no one who lives in the real world-- certainly not me, is advocating that everybody just scrap their GUIS and go back to the console. When I speak of the Command Line, that's not the Command Line I am speaking of. Today the GNU/Linux Command Line is not separate from the GUI desktop. It's a part of the desktop, carried in applications like KDE's Konsole, Gnome-terminal, and Xterm. (I know I'm repeating myself... am I getting through?) Some of these terminal windows have some very sophisticated features including choices of text size and visual schema (a fancy word for "theme") and, significantly, full functionality for copying and pasting of text.
But it is the context of working from inside the desktop that makes the 21st century Command Line a completely different creature: always a servant, never a master. As a part of the desktop, the Command Line can only make computing faster and easier, because if it doesn't, you don't have to use it. That's the biggest difference between the 1980's Command Line, and the 2007 Command Line.
Always a servant, never a master! I use the Command Line several times a day, maybe several hundred. It's never because I'm trying to slow myself down... and it's not because I'm showing off. No one sees me but my cat, Cecil Caliban, and he's more impressed by my ability to use the can opener than by my ability to use the command line.
In the the 1980's, it was a matter of one tool being better than another tool. Now it's a matter of two tools being better than one tool. Think of the GUI as a hammer, and the Command Line as a screwdriver. Which is the better tool? Obviously, it depends on whether you're trying to drive a nail or a screw. Once, we all used the screwdriver for every job, whether it involved screws or nails.. Now many, many people are using a hammer for every job. To drive a screw with a hammer may be easier than to drive a nail with a screwdriver, but trust me, learning to use both tools, and to discern the screws from the nails, will open up the process like nothing else.
Here comes the kind of presumptuous statement that I usually try to avoid. GNU/Linux will begin to make sense to you, to become that legendary OS that turns its users into crazed, devoted fanbois and fangirlz, and not just a "free" version of windows, when you begin to use the Command Line... not to replace but to supplement and extend your desktop experience. If you've already traveled from Windows to Linux, that's a long way to go to not get the full experience.
And it doesn't take much. You don't have to learn to use the Command Line to do everything. Trust me, Dorothy; a handful of simple commands is all that it takes to open that door and step across the threshold into a brand new technicolor world.
Yes, Dorothy, I know; the Command Line sounds like black and white to you. Prepare to be surprised. You're not in Redmond anymore.
) at the prompt to start windows 3.1.
