Quote:
They reek of 70's style thinking. This is 2004.

That reeks of windows style thinking...

GUI system (i.e. modification of the functionality of your computer) interfaces are just consoles with little boxes that limit where you may enter text.

The idea that a "User" should have the ability to randomly screw his computer because the operating system should be "User friendly" is ill-considered.

Novices can easily perform complex procedures on the command line. Any literate (Not computer, just 6th grade reading level) person can follow a list of instructions and reproduce them on a command line. Try writing the same procedure out for a GUI.... "Where is the menu bar?", "Which X?", "Minimize, what's that?"....

User friendly is also why windows thinks it knows better than you, even when you know that you just removed the Nvidia video card and put in an ATI card, windows still tries to save you from yourself, which in turn causes more frustration for advanced users, and completely stumps the novice. Since the novice users won't be able to figure it out for themselves anyway, why not give advanced users the tools they need to quickly fix the problems that arise?

GUI's are getting closer to being a viable sole interface, but until computers can reasonably handle speech recognition, text based interaction with your computer is here to stay.

There is a time and place for a GUI. To make simple tasks easy. For important tasks, one must have a concise set of instructions, and what instructions could be easier to follow than, "repeat after me."

Amen. Command line apps work fine when you have the approach that a naked call brings you some basic help with information no how to get more, in comparison to single-window apps. It falls apart when you get sets of tools - in commandline land, you don't even know where to start. Compare Vi to notepad. If I keep clicking menus in notepad, I'll eventually get help, and see how to open, close, and save documents. In Vi, I can't even figure out how to quit the goddamn thing without going to external references.

Command line is for high-end productivity stuff - nerd tools. Sed and grep and suchlike. Scripting toys. But for simple "I need to do X" gui apps are the way to go.

Imho, the best approach was old Autocad, where the command line was visible and you could tinker with it, and the gui stuff was a wrapper for the command line. So, from within the app, you could go either way, and if the user cared to pay attention they could learn the command line system from using the GUI.

The basic fact is this - lets say I need to do something esoteric - like find a tool to convert files of type X to type Y. I guarantee that I could do that faster under Windows. I don't have to worry about build instructions, man pages, etc. Just run installer, open app. That's what people want - learn to do a task quickly the first time, and worry about honing their skills later.

The ultimate fact is this: you need both a script interface to all your app's functions (be it hacking ini files, activeX script bindings, or command line) and a gui interface for the people who actually want to use it. If you're missing one, it ain't finished. Windows apps are very nasty to script - COM objects are annoying to work with compared to, say, Python modules or command-line tools.

Quote:Original post by s_p_oneil
nVidia provides installs for popular versions of Linux to keep users from having to re-compile it themselves, but anyone with a less popular version will need to re-compile it. Also, upgrading your kernel can break your video driver.

No. You never need to recompile your kernel (unless you're lacking features of course) to install nvidia drivers. If you're running a kernel not from a major distribution, the nvidia installer needs the kernel sources to grab the header files it needs in order to link their binary package into a kernel module, but you don't have to recompile the kernel.

Trust me, I've run four different distributions with nvidia hardware with plenty of different kernels without having to recompile.

Distros such as suse already mimick windows pretty well with guis throughout. I think the cli argument is old news and thankfully behind us.