[kwlug-disc] the command line vs. gui

[unsolicited]

John Johnson wrote, On 04/07/2011 9:45 PM:
> FYI:
> 
> http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-center/why-guis-suck-revisited-515?source=footer 

What a crock.

I don't disbelieve the story. I've BEEN there. I've done this change, 
with both types of systems.

The premise assumes zero benefit to the other 362 days of a year. And 
all 365 for each year you don't have to do this.

There are TOO many areas. We all have to get way more done, in a wider 
variety of areas, than we have time for. You cannot do a deep dive 
into everything.

Let alone that it's too simplistic. Every such change presents an 
opportunity to update, to revamp, to remove some crud. Inevitably 
taken advantage of. Way more than a simple sed script gets used. And a 
lot of that is planning, careful transition, and testing. Oh, and, of 
course, nothing can go down in the interim.

Some years ago, it seems, an astonishing paradigm change happened in 
windows - everything went command line. I'm not saying it went well. 
Far more can be scripted now than ever before.

Systems are evolving - more and more often there is both a GUI and a 
command line.

You may not stick with the GUI long, depending upon how intensively 
and over what period of time you have to work with a particular thing. 
But, in the beginning, a gui gives you a forest view instead of a 
tree, letting you more quickly and graphically sink into an ecosystem. 
(webmin is probably a good example of this.) For the fine tuning, sure 
you quickly migrate to the command line - if, the current priority 
demands more in depth work, and time permits. By if you're drive by 
problem solving, on the way to what you're really trying to get done, 
probably due to a hiccup that's impacting you, most will head to the 
gui first. If you're already comprehensively familiar with all the 
intervening pieces, that's not true, you don't head for the gui first. 
But how did you get to the point of being so comprehensively familiar.

I don't dispute that a command line should always be available - but 
long live KDE.

Such stories are a discredit to the IT industry.