Re: The Linux Revolution: What Happened?

From: Tobias Brox (tobias_at_stud.cs.uit.no)
Date: 08/01/05 

Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 02:42:21 +0000 (UTC)

[Jeff]
> It seems to me that more control, more stability and security are what
> everyone would consider good things to have.
[...]
> And the text
> interface is always there for those who feed their egos by their memory of
> arcane commands - all of which should be able to be just as well accessed
> with a good graphic interface. After all, even the text command is an
> interface.

Maybe I'm entirely arcane, but for me text interface is the only
interface that gives me control and flexibility. There are just so
many things you can't easily do using a point-and-click interface -
just the simplest thing of it all, pressing Ctrl-R to search for the
command history and repeating (eventually slightly modifying) an
earlier typed command - there is no such equivalent with
point-and-click interfaces.

After all, what one needs for having control of the computer is a
basic ability to program - and as far as I know, there are no good
programming languages as of today that doesn't rely on a text
interface. Bash is as much a programming langauge as an interface for
launching programs. Of course, one have to be very skilled to take
full advantage of it, but there is quite some simple stuff that can be
done by ordinary people; i.e. chaining commands, i.e. "copy images
from camera; start image viewer" or "copy images from camera to disk;
burn images to CD".

The first digital camera I had was boundled with some software for
transfering images to the computer; it was crap. It was a
point-and-click interface, and for every image it downloaded, the
image would pop up at the screen disturbing whatever kind of work I
was trying to do. The program had options for "take image" and "delete
image from camera", but I didn't see the point at all, it was much
faster to do those operations from the camera itself than to do it
through the mouse and the program. But then I found a command line
tool for it, I got an idea, and within a minute I had set up a loop
"take picture; transfer image to web; delete image from camera; sleep
30" - and presto, I had a web camera throwing live pictures at the
web. How do you do that with a point-and-click interface? I think
the average windows user would search for a separate "webcam"-program
to do that. Now, if the camera can be accessed through the command
line, it's not needed to be any expert to fix the 5-line webcam
program above - but as long as the camera can only be accessed through
pointing and clicking (or the buttons at the camera itself), one will
need an expert to fix the task.

Or, when my wife wants to send pictures by email, she carefully
selects the fotos she wants to send, open each and one of them in
photoshop, asks fotoshop to resize the photo, and sends it. That's
the typical point-and-click way of doing things - maybe there exists
some smart functionality in photoshop for "resize n photos" or some
other applications for this, but that's not the point. When I do the
same operation, I use command-line tools for resizing the photo, even
if the command works for a single photo at a time, it's completely
trivial to fix "resize all the selected photos" in one go, not having
to do repeated time-consuming work (that's what we have the computer
for, after all, isn't it?).

It seems to me that most people, even including quite some
computer-literate people, consider point-and-click interfaces to be
much easier to use than the command line. Yes, indeed, doing advanced
stuff on the command line does require some knowledge, and manual
pages are quite often difficult to digest - but the simplest of the
simple - to launch an application - well, if I come to a computer
where I expect "firefox" to be installed, all I have to do is to type
"firefox" in a terminal window. That's not difficult, and it does not
take much time to do. Searching for the right place to click with the
mouse can be very time-consuming and frustrating. 

-- 
Tobias Brox, Tromsų, Arctic Norway
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