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Comment by Orou | Hacker News Reader

The command line is much more productive for programmers. The entire issue with open source OS adoption is that these systems are not being designed with non-technical users in mind, and their GUIs are lackluster to say the least.

I really don't understand this attitude. It's like a woodworker talking about how much better handcrafted furniture is than the mass-produced stuff you'd buy online. Of course it's better! But does that really mean the answer is for everyone to spend years learning furniture-making? Same goes for computer systems: most people are not, don't want to be, and never will be technical users.

If we want open-source systems to beat closed-source, consent-engineered spyware from dominating people's online lives then we need to meet them where they are.

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My opinion is that until the Linux Desktop Experience is redone from the ground up to cater to the "It Just Works" crowd, the people who don't want to search the internet for 45 minutes to get the one line of code they need to type into the terminal to get the app they want to use to work correctly before realizing that the app doesn't fit their use case and they now need to search for another one, that Linux will always remain the OS equivalent of a tank when people want to drive cars.

Sure, it will get you there, and practically nothing can stop it, but it's never going to reach the "climb in, sit down and go" ease of a sedan.

> but it's never going to reach the "climb in, sit down and go" ease of a sedan.

For someone fluent in command line usage, this is very wrong. I'm 10000x more productive in a terminal and X Browser session than on windows, and almost never need to look things up (and when I rarely do, it's on man pages, not web).

But otherwise, I don't disagree. I'm not trying to convince windows users to switch to Linux (unless they're devs, in which case they will suffer professionally if they don't).

For most regular users, I recommend Chromebooks these days.

I don't even think it caters particularly well to technical users, since I am one. I think it caters mostly to C programmers who don't use GUIs and web developers. Anyone else is encouraged to change their use case to match if they want to use a Linux Desktop.

Most modern GUI IDEs are well integrated with the command line.

I was taking about devs above, since we're on hn.

And good command lines, like propeller configured bash or zsh, have better discoverability than most GUIs.

But sure, I point non devs to Chromebooks, Macs, (or windows if absolutely necessary).

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