Wrong all these years
We’ve been trying for ages, in the Linux world, to get away from the idea that you have to open up a command line to do anything complicated. Gnome and KDE have been making big strides toward this goal (Mac people may smile happily because they had this nailed 20 years ago*). And now what do we see? In the Windows Vista Self-Guided Tour over in Microsoft Technet, the first section of the tour begins:
- Log on as administrator and start a command prompt by clicking Start, Run, and then typing
command. - Create a new user account named Toby by typing
Net user Toby /add. The account will be created with a blank password.
Amazing.
* Although not any more, since as has been said, what’s the most powerful improvement Apple was able to make? They finally put a god damned shell back in. Then again, that was said by Jamie ‘now I use a Mac anyway’ Zawinski, so I don’t know what to think now.
To be fair, it was an article aimed at “high-level users“. I suspect that by the final release, there’ll be plenty of GUI frontends for adding user accounts. Still, a command prompt in Windows with commands other than “cd” and “format” is still a Big Step Forward.
9 hours later
To be fair, it was an article aimed at “high-level users“. I suspect that by the final release, there’ll be plenty of GUI frontends for adding user accounts. Still, a command prompt in Windows with commands other than “cd” and “format” is still a Big Step Forward.
10 hours later
I think it depends what sort of user you are – I’m quite happy (and prefer) using the command line for nearly everything. To me a desktop environment is a window manager which arranges the terminals/web browsers for me.
From looking at some more of that article, I see that it’s almost the worst situation – you can do some stuff in the shell, and other stuff (next step(s)) requires the GUI. That’s the worst combination (in terms of mouse movement/speed of operation etc).
Long live the shell!
DG
10 hours later
The command line is the ultimate killer feature of Linux. The ability to be able to do almost anything you want via the command line is priceless. The Windows shell has always been massively half-arsed, and I am expecting the Vista shell to be, frankly, shite compared to bash.
Linux will continue to improve it’s graphical front-ends, and Windows will continue to fail to have a command line that is anything short of woeful.
19 hours later
I’m with DG and mrben on this: the amazing power of the shell is one of The Great Things™ about Unix, and the best thing a window manager can do for me is manage my xterms and a browser, and then get the hell out of my way. The best way to make a Windows box useful is to install some random free Unix; the second best way is to install Cygwin.
2 days later