Re: Linux’s Curse

Brian McCallister comments on my earlier comments on Preston Gralla’s comments on Linux on the desktop. By and large I agree with Brian, the UNIX command line is a sensationally powerful thing which provides awesome flexibility and power for those who wish to learn it. The downside is it’s awful trying to learn it. I spend a lot of time at a bash command line and I still couldn’t tell you off the top of my head what Brian’s examples do. They’re simple and straight forward to him because he uses those tools every day, I don’t so they’re very foreign and require learning (I use different command line programs). GUIs have a major learnability advantage because the options are (or should be) visible to the user. More importantly though, in the context of Linux on the desktop the power of the command line disappears to a very large degree. OS X is a very good example of this because it is UNIX on the desktop and you find that most people don’t use the command line very much if at all. Mostly that’s because they can’t be bothered learning it and because they typically don’t have a need for the power it provides. The key point though and it was the main point of my arguments is summed up so well with Brian’s comment:

Admittedly, I am using OS X, not linux. In other words, all that power isn’t a linux feature but a UNIX feature, available on any UNIX implementation – including Cygwin. If you lived on the command line then something like Linux where the command line is such a central part of the OS is definitely going to better than Windows and Cygwin but if you just need the occasional uber-command then Cygwin and Windows is going to be just as good for you. In short, the command line is a great feature of Linux but it’s not an exclusive. Linux needs “exclusives” to provide compelling reasons for people to go through the pain of changing OS’s. Mac has Aqua, Quartz and particularly the iApps, Windows is where everyone is at now so requires no effort to stay the same, Linux doesn’t have anything on the desktop that I can see. I hope that makes my point clearer…