43's an exaggeration, but when something goes wrong the command-line is generally the only way to fix it even in the friendliest of distros. In the old days in

43's an exaggeration, but when something goes wrong the command-line is generally the only way to fix it even in the friendliest of distros. In the old days in order to effectively use Linux at all anyone would have had to become familiar with the terminal and how it all works. Nowadays users only have to do that when something goes wrong - and of course that's great progress, but it does mean that those users are less prepared to deal with issues. It's also easier to get help than it used ("RTFM n00b") to be, but that help is almost always in the form of some arcane command without any explanation of what it is, so it doesn't really help anyone learn. Personally I'd like to see all this stuff hooked up to a GUI, with easily accessible docs for everything built in. (I think Windows is actually quite good, unfortunately parts of Microsoft have become very user-hostile. I wish they'd just say "buy the new Windows! It's $200, we'll support it for 6 years, it will have no ads, it won't require any "cloud" and it will not harvest your personal data.")