3 ms·

If that's their stated goal, then they should just come out with it and let all of the users that spend a good majority of their time in terminals migrate to so

by pyre 14y ago

If that's their stated goal, then they should just come out with it and let all of the users that spend a good majority of their time in terminals migrate to something else. I have a sneaking suspicion that GNOME usage would take a nosedive if they were to do this.

mpyne 14y ago
Honestly I don't think that would happen even if they plainly stated it. At this point the writing has been on the wall for years and yet the "power users" who would care about this still haven't switched. Whether it's Stockholm syndrome, or self-blaming, or "oh, that wouldn't happen to me" I don't know, but it's getting increasing harder to blame the GNOME devs... they've made their opinion very clear and they're the ones driving the ship. If you're a passenger and you think you see icebergs you need to abandon ship, not whine with the Captain about where to steer.
- juhanima 14y ago
  > If you're a passenger and you think you see icebergs > you need to abandon ship, not whine with the Captain > about where to steer. Really? Not even in the case you think the captain failed to notice the iceberg, and a simple heads up would save not only yours but all the other passengers' lives? Nothing ot do with Gnome, I suppose, but this was a really bad analogy.
  - mpyne 14y ago
    Perhaps I shouldn't have used "iceberg" as that implies some upcoming inevitable disaster, which I don't think is true of this situation. The GNOME devs could certainly end up very successful. I happen to disagree with the course, but it's their right as developers to choose a different direction. At some point as a user you have to come to grips with the fact that their vision and yours have diverged. There are undoubtedly many other users who prefer this different direction and they can't all be right. Find the boat going the direction you want to go and climb aboard and help out.
- nine_k 14y ago
  Linus wrote a few months ago that he'd switched to Xfce. Does he count as a power user?
  - pyre 14y ago
    Linus is pragmatic though. He'll switch when it's necessary. E.g. BitKeeper => git, KDE3.5 => GNOME, etc
    - nine_k 14y ago
      BitKeeper -> git was a painful necessity when BitKeeper started to want money. It's switching to BitKeeper was pragmatism over hardcore open-source principles, a 'lesser evil'. I have to learn more about KDE -> Gnome, since I remember it was the other way around :)
      - GhotiFish 14y ago
        Really? In when Linus did his talk about git for Google Tech Talks, he explained that the reason they parted ways because many of the linux developers were taking issue to working in a non-libre environment, I seem to recall... hmmm here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
        pyre 14y ago
        BitKeeper was non-libre for a long time, but they dropped the free-to-the-community version[1] which forced the move. Linus drew criticism for a long time over the usage of a non-libre version control system for the Linux kernel. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitkeeper#Pricing_change http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitkeeper#Pricing_change
        mpyne 14y ago
        If no one has ever read the backstory behind this it's actually a good tale. There was more to the issue than BK simply deciding to drop the free version. The short story behind that one of the Samba authors helped force Free Software along in more ways than one!
jcape 14y ago
The terminal is a power-user feature. Unfortunately, there's too much fragile nonsense undergirding Linux to be able to do away with the CLI in the default install right now.
- mercurial 14y ago
  I think you are severely underestimating the number of people considering the CLI to be a feature.
  - pyre 14y ago
    Are you disagreeing with this: | The terminal is a power-user feature I don't see any comment on the number of power users out there. Most of the people on this forum would probably be considered power users.
    - saurik 14y ago
      I think you have to look at the actual market: Linux is primarily used by people who are power users; I'd go so far as to say that the vast majority of people using Linux are power users, and that the reason they switched to Linux in the first place was specifically because they were power users, and Linux catered to them better. Now, the best software projects on Linux, ones that had previously been creating software that power users liked, and which became important at all because of the power users that switched over to using it, have apparently decided that power users are a minority segment of the overall market and that they are no longer worth optimizing for. To make this clear: imagine if Windows, which currently is marketing itself to the "average computer user segment", a user segment that by-and-large were humans with some large subset of eyes, hands, and ears, and decided that the real money in the future was going to be branching out to take over the "any organism of any form" market. Of course, that market has no real use for a keyboard or a mouse, as the majority of organisms don't have fingers. They can't see the screen, and they probably can't even reason in symbols. So the entire user interface starts getting converted into some kind of EM sensitive yes/no detector that is mostly useful for doing simple arithmetic. Would this be reasonable? Would the people who currently use Windows not find this ludicrous? This analogy is obviously downright insane, but frankly I think it covers the situation here really well: the people who care about Linux are power users, so by forsaking power users they are forsaking their entire existing market segment. For a simpler analogy, that I think also nails the core of the problem here while seeming really awkward: imagine if ALL the worlds best manufacturers of semi-trucks decided that cars were more profitable, and so decided to start marketing their products to them, not just by adding amenities but by making them less useful as semi-trucks. So, over time, new models stop taking diesel, they force a back seat into the front, they add an optional trunk, and one they they decide to just remove the option to hitch things to the back at all. Would this be sane? This may even make sense on some kind of long-term strategy to take over the car market, but their market doesn't want a car. Here, then: yes, I would agree with "the terminal is a power-user feature", but it is missing the point entirely to then argue that "I don't see any comment on the number of power users out there" here: claiming something is a power-user feature in order to justify its removal is indicating "small market segment", but power users are the market segment.

by pyre 14y ago

mpyne 14y ago

Honestly I don't think that would happen even if they plainly stated it. At this point the writing has been on the wall for years and yet the "power users" who would care about this still haven't switched. Whether it's Stockholm syndrome, or self-blaming, or "oh, that wouldn't happen to me" I don't know, but it's getting increasing harder to blame the GNOME devs... they've made their opinion very clear and they're the ones driving the ship. If you're a passenger and you think you see icebergs you need to abandon ship, not whine with the Captain about where to steer.

juhanima 14y ago
> If you're a passenger and you think you see icebergs > you need to abandon ship, not whine with the Captain > about where to steer. Really? Not even in the case you think the captain failed to notice the iceberg, and a simple heads up would save not only yours but all the other passengers' lives? Nothing ot do with Gnome, I suppose, but this was a really bad analogy.
- mpyne 14y ago
  Perhaps I shouldn't have used "iceberg" as that implies some upcoming inevitable disaster, which I don't think is true of this situation. The GNOME devs could certainly end up very successful. I happen to disagree with the course, but it's their right as developers to choose a different direction. At some point as a user you have to come to grips with the fact that their vision and yours have diverged. There are undoubtedly many other users who prefer this different direction and they can't all be right. Find the boat going the direction you want to go and climb aboard and help out.
nine_k 14y ago
Linus wrote a few months ago that he'd switched to Xfce. Does he count as a power user?
- pyre 14y ago
  Linus is pragmatic though. He'll switch when it's necessary. E.g. BitKeeper => git, KDE3.5 => GNOME, etc
  - nine_k 14y ago
    BitKeeper -> git was a painful necessity when BitKeeper started to want money. It's switching to BitKeeper was pragmatism over hardcore open-source principles, a 'lesser evil'. I have to learn more about KDE -> Gnome, since I remember it was the other way around :)
    - GhotiFish 14y ago
      Really? In when Linus did his talk about git for Google Tech Talks, he explained that the reason they parted ways because many of the linux developers were taking issue to working in a non-libre environment, I seem to recall... hmmm here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
      - pyre 14y ago
        BitKeeper was non-libre for a long time, but they dropped the free-to-the-community version[1] which forced the move. Linus drew criticism for a long time over the usage of a non-libre version control system for the Linux kernel. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitkeeper#Pricing_change http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitkeeper#Pricing_change
        mpyne 14y ago
        If no one has ever read the backstory behind this it's actually a good tale. There was more to the issue than BK simply deciding to drop the free version. The short story behind that one of the Samba authors helped force Free Software along in more ways than one!

jcape 14y ago

The terminal is a power-user feature. Unfortunately, there's too much fragile nonsense undergirding Linux to be able to do away with the CLI in the default install right now.

mercurial 14y ago
I think you are severely underestimating the number of people considering the CLI to be a feature.
- pyre 14y ago
  Are you disagreeing with this: | The terminal is a power-user feature I don't see any comment on the number of power users out there. Most of the people on this forum would probably be considered power users.
  - saurik 14y ago
    I think you have to look at the actual market: Linux is primarily used by people who are power users; I'd go so far as to say that the vast majority of people using Linux are power users, and that the reason they switched to Linux in the first place was specifically because they were power users, and Linux catered to them better. Now, the best software projects on Linux, ones that had previously been creating software that power users liked, and which became important at all because of the power users that switched over to using it, have apparently decided that power users are a minority segment of the overall market and that they are no longer worth optimizing for. To make this clear: imagine if Windows, which currently is marketing itself to the "average computer user segment", a user segment that by-and-large were humans with some large subset of eyes, hands, and ears, and decided that the real money in the future was going to be branching out to take over the "any organism of any form" market. Of course, that market has no real use for a keyboard or a mouse, as the majority of organisms don't have fingers. They can't see the screen, and they probably can't even reason in symbols. So the entire user interface starts getting converted into some kind of EM sensitive yes/no detector that is mostly useful for doing simple arithmetic. Would this be reasonable? Would the people who currently use Windows not find this ludicrous? This analogy is obviously downright insane, but frankly I think it covers the situation here really well: the people who care about Linux are power users, so by forsaking power users they are forsaking their entire existing market segment. For a simpler analogy, that I think also nails the core of the problem here while seeming really awkward: imagine if ALL the worlds best manufacturers of semi-trucks decided that cars were more profitable, and so decided to start marketing their products to them, not just by adding amenities but by making them less useful as semi-trucks. So, over time, new models stop taking diesel, they force a back seat into the front, they add an optional trunk, and one they they decide to just remove the option to hitch things to the back at all. Would this be sane? This may even make sense on some kind of long-term strategy to take over the car market, but their market doesn't want a car. Here, then: yes, I would agree with "the terminal is a power-user feature", but it is missing the point entirely to then argue that "I don't see any comment on the number of power users out there" here: claiming something is a power-user feature in order to justify its removal is indicating "small market segment", but power users are the market segment.