"When something does not work in Linuxland the answer is still "open the terminal, enter a bunch of cryptic commands" and/or manually edit text-based config fil

"When something does not work in Linuxland the answer is still "open the terminal, enter a bunch of cryptic commands" and/or manually edit text-based config files. I can do that easily, I grew up with DOS." I can install CentOS on a laptop, add repositories and install multimedia codecs/applications, change the language and set periodic updates all without any use of the terminal at all. I suspect that part of the reason that terminal commands are given on support fora is simply that it is easier to provide the text command than it is to describe a series of steps in words that you have to execute on a GUI. I also suspect that another part of the reason is that people who really know about Unix like OSes tend to be from a sys admin or programmer background and are more comfortable with the terminal. Agreed that this is going to have to change soon! "- (Ubuntu) Getting my wifi to work. Do I even have to start? I ended up having to download a kernel module .tarball from somewhere, had to integrate that into the kernel, and edit some config files by hand. Again, no problem, Google is magic. However it wasted one hour of my life: unacceptable. On Windows getting the wifi to work required.. clicking on setup.exe." Well of course Windows is easier to find drivers for, it is the operating system for which the cheap commodity hardware you can buy is designed. Having said that, I'm surprised that Ubuntu's restricted driver identification was unable to find the WiFi kernel module you needed. What was the module you installed and which version of Ubuntu did you install it on? My reason for asking is that having 'manually' installed a kernel module, you may have to repeat the exercise for each kernel update.