There's some merit in what the professor is saying. A lot of the minutiae get in the way when you want to get something done. Who wants to wrestle with some obs

There's some merit in what the professor is saying. A lot of the minutiae get in the way when you want to get something done. Who wants to wrestle with some obscure option to some kernel module to get ones graphics drivers working before starting work on a serious graphics project? However, having grown up in an era when GNU/Linux wasn't friendly at all, I think I learnt a lot of stuff that's valuable to me even today. Much of it was concrete factoids which I no longer need or use but the valuable parts were some kind of "meta" skills (which Eytan[1] discusses much more eloquently in his rebuttal) which serve me very well even though I don't wrangle with the nitty gritty of getting obscure software working on my computer. Some examples I can think of are. a. I can decipher man pages and other unfriendly but mostly technically complete documentation. b. I can speak the language of the programmer fairly well which makes my work much more smoother than if I had to speak through a UX interpreter. c. Given some kind of task, I have the confidence that once I learn the domain specific stuff, the computer and software can't really cripple me and prevent me from getting work done. d. In case of an emergency, I know where the metaphorical life jackets are and what to do. I also have the confidence to get and use them. e. I'm conversant with the ideas of pipes and other such tools that allow me to automate away annoying tasks which would have otherwise bothered me. f. Even when resources are scarce (e.g. over a slow net connection on some remote machine), I know that I get work done without the fancy interfaces. This makes me generally more efficient and I don't think I'd trade all those years of dealing with these arcane tools for anything else. I mentor students these days and a thumb rule I use to evaluate them is to see if the've managed to install a "non-mainstream" Gnu/Linux distro on their machines. If they've managed, it's almost surely a sign that they're good learners. This is not an argument for making command line interfaces hard or keeping them that way. It's just that there's a school of thought that'll sacrifice ease of use for power and there's some value in that even for people not directly working on the tools themselves. Footnotes: [1]: https://medium.com/@eytanadar/on-the-value-of-command-line-bullshittery-94dc19ec8c61#.4qt0dd22r https://medium.com/@eytanadar/on-the-value-of-command-line-b...