Hello all there, On Wed, 3 May 2000, Steve Lamb wrote: > For me it isn't a GUI/CLI mindset it is simply the ability to do what > needs to be done. Windows doesn't let me do that in most cases. The standard > 'nix utilities provide a lot of automation for mundane tasks.
I've been following this thread for some time, and this is exactly the mail I've always been waiting for, because IMHO that's exactly the point about the whole discussion. The first time I had contact with Unix in general was in my soil physics lecture at university. We've been calculating some models on water and solute flux in soils on IBM RS/6000 machines with AIX, and as none of us two students in the course had any knowledge about Unix, the Prof gave us a short introduction. One thing I kept specially in mind: We had to remove a directory, so the prof said (in german, I'm translating into English): "Just enter rm -rf directory/. rm means remove, r means recursive and f means force: Do it and don't ask stupid questions" (the computer, not us students). So we entered it and the computer did it and didn't ask stupid questions. Being at that time used to the windoze way of doing things, where you often have to "struggle some kind of fight" with your computer to get things done, I've at once been fascinated by the way you tell the computer in clear precise language, what he has to do, and he does it. We have been doing other "fancy" (for me at that time) things on the computers, so this course could actually be seen as a turning point in my attitude towards computers and OSes. So a short time later I switched to Linux on my computer at home (doing it quite radically, not that kind of dual-boot stuff;-). So to focus on the main point again: It really isn't the GUI/CLI-matter. I like GUIs. But sometimes things can be done much faster, easier and more precise on the command line. And this "being able to choose the way to do things and being able to do things that have to be done" (And you don't have that in windoze) is one of the main advantages of UNIX/Linux. Regards, Daniel P.S.: Some might perhaps consider this mail much too long, or much too far off topic for this list, but sorry: I just had to get this off my chest.
