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CLI is great from *NIX perspective and I believe most of us had used it extensively in the past. I still use CLI but if and only if it suits as the best tool fo

CLI is great from *NIX perspective and I believe most of us had used it extensively in the past. I still use CLI but if and only if it suits as the best tool for the problem I'm working on. The fact is, that the paradigm has changed, therefore the way we interact with our computing devices. IMHO, bigotry is not only bad in politics. We have to embrace the change, learn new tools, improve, share our knowledge and not only make our jobs better for ourselves, but also for others. Especially for rookies, who will have to be doing more tomorrow than what we do today. I don't believe `libcaca` has anything to serve this purpose. Using mutt instead of gmail; I'd ask "Why?". We don't need to stick with the tools we've used 10 years ago. If I'd be looking for a challenge as a sysadmin, I'd learn ways to better utilize cloud environments, look for better ways to serve static content for large volume systems, improve my tool base for managing geographically distributed servers, learn about the requirements of the new era of real time web, how to deploy node.js on my servers, etc.

DanBC 15y ago
You point out that you're familiar with the command line, thus this article isn't really for you. For people who haven't used CLI before; or who don't have much experience of the command line: it makes some things about the Unix way a bit clearer. One program does one task, but does it well. You pass the output from one command into the input of another. Input and output are text, because text is universal. These are important powerful concepts and I'm disappointed that they've largely been forgotten in the GUI world. I'm also baffled that my vastly powerful computer has areas of lagginess when grinding through some seemingly trivial things. A pure-CLI trivially-easy-to-install distro[1] isn't going to happen, but imagine the use people could get from all those old computers which are not coping with modern OSs. [1] Linux from scratch definitely does not count. TinyCore doesn't really count. Arch sort of comes close, but would need to be i) Much easier to install and ii) have a specific repository for CLI / Curses / etc software.
klez 15y ago
Until you screw your X configuration very badly. For this exact reason, in my first experiences with GNU/Linux, I reinstalled the distro every time X was screwed.

DanBC 15y ago

You point out that you're familiar with the command line, thus this article isn't really for you. For people who haven't used CLI before; or who don't have much experience of the command line: it makes some things about the Unix way a bit clearer. One program does one task, but does it well. You pass the output from one command into the input of another. Input and output are text, because text is universal. These are important powerful concepts and I'm disappointed that they've largely been forgotten in the GUI world. I'm also baffled that my vastly powerful computer has areas of lagginess when grinding through some seemingly trivial things. A pure-CLI trivially-easy-to-install distro[1] isn't going to happen, but imagine the use people could get from all those old computers which are not coping with modern OSs. [1] Linux from scratch definitely does not count. TinyCore doesn't really count. Arch sort of comes close, but would need to be i) Much easier to install and ii) have a specific repository for CLI / Curses / etc software.

klez 15y ago

Until you screw your X configuration very badly. For this exact reason, in my first experiences with GNU/Linux, I reinstalled the distro every time X was screwed.