Linux for noobs

digitalscream

olafgarten said:

Windows has sorted out the Installation time, it takes less than an hour on any decent laptop. 

I was referring to the time taken for all the stuff that comes *after* installation - installing drivers, applications, and patches. The problem with Windows patches is that they're designed to be applied sequentially (reasonable), but with unavoidable reboots in the middle. Linux doesn't have that problem, because almost any service can be restarted on the fly as needed, so you can just blast all the patches in one go and come back later (or even carry on using your machine).

Installing drivers and applications is similarly quicker, because of the repository model.

Not arguing, just explaining what I meant

Emp_Fab

CLI is a dead interfacing method.  Once upon a time CLI was all there was, then game the GUI.  And Lo, the people said “All hail the GUI, that CLI shit can go fuck itself”, and so it was that the people deserted the lands of CLI.  Except for the weirdos.  The weirdos said unto the people “Don’t leave! - the CLI is hugely powerful if only you would learn it!”.  And yea, the people dids’t reply “Learn?  Are you mental?  Ours is the path of least resistance and instant gratification - sling yer ‘ook beardy”.

And that was the way it was until all the weirdos died out and CLI land was no more.

digitalscream

Emp_Fab said:

CLI is a dead interfacing method.  Once upon a time CLI was all there was, then game the GUI.  And Lo, the people said “All hail the GUI, that CLI shit can go fuck itself”, and so it was that the people deserted the lands of CLI.  Except for the weirdos.  The weirdos said unto the people “Don’t leave! - the CLI is hugely powerful if only you would learn it!”.  And yea, the people dids’t reply “Learn?  Are you mental?  Ours is the path of least resistance and instant gratification - sling yer ‘ook beardy”.

And that was the way it was until all the weirdos died out and CLI land was no more.

...and thus did it come to pass that the Internet died

monquixote

Emp_Fab said:

monquixote said:

Emp_Fab said:

True, but the amount of time spent reverting a Windows box back to a working state is usually a tiny fraction of the time spent trying to get a Linux box to work as you want in the first place!

Not sure I agree with that.

I've got a Windows 7 laptop that's completely fucked due to a Windows update and because I don't have the install media or licence key it's now a paperweight unless I put more effort into it than I can be bothered to invest reinstalling it all and getting it set up. I've had multiple experiences along those lines.
 
Never had a problem with getting Ubuntu working, but then I do understand the command line. To my mind switching to a Linux desktop and then complaining that you have to use the command line and it's doesn't work properly is a bit like switching to a motorbike, but refusing to use the engine and then complaining it's not as fast as your pedal bike. The command line is the point, that's why Microsoft have just added the Linux command line to Windows.

You don't need either to run System Restore.  You could have your laptop working in minutes.  Failing that, you could just reimage it from the backup image you have.

Are you saying that switching to Linux as a user that doesn't want to use the CLI is pointless then ?

Weird that I spent 3 hours fucking about with it and put it in a drawer then.

I'd say Linux without command line is like driving a convertible but never putting the top down. It's not totally insane but you may be missing the point.

monquixote

Emp_Fab said:

CLI is a dead interfacing method.  Once upon a time CLI was all there was, then game the GUI.  And Lo, the people said “All hail the GUI, that CLI shit can go fuck itself”, and so it was that the people deserted the lands of CLI.  Except for the weirdos.  The weirdos said unto the people “Don’t leave! - the CLI is hugely powerful if only you would learn it!”.  And yea, the people dids’t reply “Learn?  Are you mental?  Ours is the path of least resistance and instant gratification - sling yer ‘ook beardy”.

And that was the way it was until all the weirdos died out and CLI land was no more.

Given that Microsoft have just updated Windows 10 to add in the Linux command line your argument is clearly invalid.

darthed1981

monquixote said:

Emp_Fab said:

CLI is a dead interfacing method.  Once upon a time CLI was all there was, then game the GUI.  And Lo, the people said “All hail the GUI, that CLI shit can go fuck itself”, and so it was that the people deserted the lands of CLI.  Except for the weirdos.  The weirdos said unto the people “Don’t leave! - the CLI is hugely powerful if only you would learn it!”.  And yea, the people dids’t reply “Learn?  Are you mental?  Ours is the path of least resistance and instant gratification - sling yer ‘ook beardy”.

And that was the way it was until all the weirdos died out and CLI land was no more.

Given that Microsoft have just updated Windows 10 to add in the Linux command line your argument is clearly invalid.

Also basically every MS GUI tool these days is just a skin on Powershell.  Heck in my Exchange 2010 server it even tells you what powershell command it is about to execute in order to further educate you!

Myranda

Emp_Fab said:

CLI is a dead interfacing method.  Once upon a time CLI was all there was, then game the GUI.  And Lo, the people said “All hail the GUI, that CLI shit can go fuck itself”, and so it was that the people deserted the lands of CLI.  Except for the weirdos.  The weirdos said unto the people “Don’t leave! - the CLI is hugely powerful if only you would learn it!”.  And yea, the people dids’t reply “Learn?  Are you mental?  Ours is the path of least resistance and instant gratification - sling yer ‘ook beardy”.

And that was the way it was until all the weirdos died out and CLI land was no more.

Well, CLI will be dead when with a mouse click you can run one program, outputting its results into a second program, filter that some how, then output that to a third while setting certain variables to alter/manipulate that then output to a text file... 

But short of every windows program having virtually limitless options and parameters which can be pain-stakingly and slowly copy-pasted from one to another... perhaps with a button to auto-sort the contents of the clipboard

Emp_Fab

My arguments are often invalid.  That doesn't change the fact that I would like Linux if it wasn't for the fact that I don't know what the hell I'm doing when I'm trying to get it to work and have to resort to googling "Why the fuck doesn't this thing do x ?" and then finding a post on a website where some beardy-weirdy is answering some other poor lost soul with the same question; "You're missing the zzbzzfart libraries.  Open a command window and type "#bishbash cuckoo ?;gzip $$clumanung$ zzbzzfart#.%9_chocksawayginger ? \dev\nippleclamps\etc !"

You have no idea of what that means or what it's doing - or why you needed to do this in the first place when you would expect the OS to not need you to type cryptic incantations into the dark command portal in order to get it to just behave properly.

I spent years growing up on DOS.  Then Windows came along and I learned that.  Now I'm presented with an OS that is trying so hard to be a mainstream GUI OS yet can't / doesn't want to let go of reliance on the CLI - in a language and fornat that is about as unintuitive as you can get.  MS may well have added a Linux CLI, but who is going to use it ?  People who know how to talk *-ix.  - and that's probably 0.0001% of the Win10 userbase.

What it boils down to is I really really want to love Linux.  I love it's ideology and ethos (if those are the right words).  I love the fact that it can resurrect old hardware that is useless for the bloatware that comes out of Redmond.  I really really do want to switch to Linux, but I just don't have the time or the patience to learn, what is to me, the equivalent of Hebrew, in order to use it.  I hate the idea of being reliant on Linux gurus to spoon-feed me instructions to get it to work.  I need to know what I'm doing.
But I need to learn Hebrew first and I'm not willing to invest that amount of time.  It's just an OS at the end of the day.  It's a platform that supports the things you are really interested in - the applications on top.

That's why I hate Linux.  Because I think it's fantastic, but it's so alien to me and I fucking hate Hebrew.

Grunfeld

@Emp_Fab -- that's pretty much it for me too.  Well said. 
Except I don't "hate" Linux it's just that I don't have the time to learn to love it. 

monquixote

Emp_Fab said:

I spent years growing up on DOS.  Then Windows came along and I learned that.  Now I'm presented with an OS that is trying so hard to be a mainstream GUI OS yet can't / doesn't want to let go of reliance on the CLI

Linux can easily be implemented without the command line (Hence Chrome OS, Android, PS4, Steam Box, etc), and those products are massively successful and sell in much greater numbers than Windows consumer desktop PCs. The majority of Linux full distros are targetted at developers and sys admins (where companies like Redhat and Canonical make money).

What it boils down to is I really really want to love Linux.  I love it's ideology and ethos (if those are the right words).  I love the fact that it can resurrect old hardware that is useless for the bloatware that comes out of Redmond.  I really really do want to switch to Linux, but I just don't have the time or the patience to learn, what is to me, the equivalent of Hebrew, in order to use it.  I hate the idea of being reliant on Linux gurus to spoon-feed me instructions to get it to work.  I need to know what I'm doing.
But I need to learn Hebrew first and I'm not willing to invest that amount of time.  It's just an OS at the end of the day.  It's a platform that supports the things you are really interested in - the applications on top.

That's why I hate Linux.  Because I think it's fantastic, but it's so alien to me and I fucking hate Hebrew.

If you want to get the full Linux experience you have to put the effort in and learn it. There are plenty of good books on the subject, but if you don't it's no crime.

Also it's not really fair to compare a Linux PC cobbled together from bits by an amateur to a Windows PC to a vendor. Buy something from a dedicated Linux PC supplier and you will have a much better experience.

Myranda

Emp_Fab said:

My arguments are often invalid.  That doesn't change the fact that I would like Linux if it wasn't for the fact that I don't know what the hell I'm doing when I'm trying to get it to work and have to resort to googling "Why the fuck doesn't this thing do x ?" and then finding a post on a website where some beardy-weirdy is answering some other poor lost soul with the same question; "You're missing the zzbzzfart libraries.  Open a command window and type "#bishbash cuckoo ?;gzip $$clumanung$ zzbzzfart#.%9_chocksawayginger ? \dev\nippleclamps\etc !"

You have no idea of what that means or what it's doing - or why you needed to do this in the first place when you would expect the OS to not need you to type cryptic incantations into the dark command portal in order to get it to just behave properly.

I spent years growing up on DOS.  Then Windows came along and I learned that.  Now I'm presented with an OS that is trying so hard to be a mainstream GUI OS yet can't / doesn't want to let go of reliance on the CLI - in a language and fornat that is about as unintuitive as you can get.  MS may well have added a Linux CLI, but who is going to use it ?  People who know how to talk *-ix.  - and that's probably 0.0001% of the Win10 userbase.

What it boils down to is I really really want to love Linux.  I love it's ideology and ethos (if those are the right words).  I love the fact that it can resurrect old hardware that is useless for the bloatware that comes out of Redmond.  I really really do want to switch to Linux, but I just don't have the time or the patience to learn, what is to me, the equivalent of Hebrew, in order to use it.  I hate the idea of being reliant on Linux gurus to spoon-feed me instructions to get it to work.  I need to know what I'm doing.
But I need to learn Hebrew first and I'm not willing to invest that amount of time.  It's just an OS at the end of the day.  It's a platform that supports the things you are really interested in - the applications on top.

That's why I hate Linux.  Because I think it's fantastic, but it's so alien to me and I fucking hate Hebrew.

Try setting up a dual-boot option in Windows without cli ...

It's done with bcdedit and bcdboot commands. There exists no GUI option in Windows. Even just changing from the blue W8/W10 version of a boot menu (which includes options that you might not want an end user to access) to the old style black-and-white boot menu takes a command line input - "bcdedit /set {ID} bootmenupolicy legacy" incidently)... oh, and to edit the bcd store 

You can do pretty much everything Windows does without using CLI at all... 

As for the format of CLI - it's very logical... but there are ways to shorten what you type which might then look illogical.

In both Windows and Linux you can get by without CLI, but its pretty much essential for any power-user use-case (for both if that wasn't clear)

Emp_Fab

mechanicalMyranda said:

Try setting up a dual-boot option in Windows without cli ...

It's done with bcdedit and bcdboot commands. There exists no GUI option in Windows. Even just changing from the blue W8/W10 version of a boot menu (which includes options that you might not want an end user to access) to the old style black-and-white boot menu takes a command line input - "bcdedit /set {ID} bootmenupolicy legacy" incidently)... oh, and to edit the bcd store 

You can do pretty much everything Windows does without using CLI at all... 

As for the format of CLI - it's very logical... but there are ways to shorten what you type which might then look illogical.

In both Windows and Linux you can get by without CLI, but its pretty much essential for any power-user use-case (for both if that wasn't clear)

Setting up a dual-boot option in Windows without CLI is a piece of piss !  Never had to use bcdedit and bcdboot - ever.  That said, it's been a while since I set up a dual (or triple) boot Windows system.  So, unless MS have gone backwards.....

The format of *-ix CLI is very logical ??  Maybe to a University undergraduate in Forensic Computing it might be (i.e. you) - but to the rest of humanity without a Borg hive for a brain, it's gibberish !  I can write some rather nice complex batch files in DOS/Windows, but I can barely list the contents of an archive in Linux.  Part of the reason *-ix commands are so cryptic is the shortening of everything - instead of "copy", it's "cp", "list" become "ls" and so on.  An artifact from the days when people in flares and tie-dies had to type instructions in on a 110 baud mechanical teletype machine.

Finally, I refute your assertion that you can get by in Linux without the CLI.  I've not managed more than fifteen minutes with any distro from a fresh install before I need to open the bloody bonnet and get the spanners out.

digitalscream

Emp_Fab said:

Finally, I refute your assertion that you can get by in Linux without the CLI.  I've not managed more than fifteen minutes with any distro from a fresh install before I need to open the bloody bonnet and get the spanners out.

I've also made that assertion, and I know it to be true. How do I know it's true? Because both my wife and daughter used Linux for years (wife still does), and they don't even know what the terminal is!

There is absolutely no need for the CLI in Linux for anything short of power user stuff, but it's a damn sight quicker to use it if you want to. For example...in Windows, you could go clicking around to get the IP address of all the network interfaces on your machine, but it'd be a hell of a lot quicker to just open a terminal and type ipconfig. You probably find yourself doing that a fair bit, right?

Why is it any different in Linux? Answer: it's not, but with Windows you spent years acquiring knowledge about its terminal incidentally. The fact that Linux is different (and you can do everything with the CLI, instead of the limited applications of Windows' terminal) scares you, that's all.

Here's the thing - if you stopped and looked at it rationally, you'd see that all you need to know are a five or six basic commands and a couple of basic principles, and you'd be able to understand pretty much any Linux commands you see (or be able to work them out, and therefore learn more as you go).

Axe_meister

Emp_Fab said:

mechanicalMyranda said:

Try setting up a dual-boot option in Windows without cli ...

It's done with bcdedit and bcdboot commands. There exists no GUI option in Windows. Even just changing from the blue W8/W10 version of a boot menu (which includes options that you might not want an end user to access) to the old style black-and-white boot menu takes a command line input - "bcdedit /set {ID} bootmenupolicy legacy" incidently)... oh, and to edit the bcd store 

You can do pretty much everything Windows does without using CLI at all... 

As for the format of CLI - it's very logical... but there are ways to shorten what you type which might then look illogical.

In both Windows and Linux you can get by without CLI, but its pretty much essential for any power-user use-case (for both if that wasn't clear)

Setting up a dual-boot option in Windows without CLI is a piece of piss !  Never had to use bcdedit and bcdboot - ever.  That said, it's been a while since I set up a dual (or triple) boot Windows system.  So, unless MS have gone backwards.....

The format of *-ix CLI is very logical ??  Maybe to a University undergraduate in Forensic Computing it might be (i.e. you) - but to the rest of humanity without a Borg hive for a brain, it's gibberish !  I can write some rather nice complex batch files in DOS/Windows, but I can barely list the contents of an archive in Linux.  Part of the reason *-ix commands are so cryptic is the shortening of everything - instead of "copy", it's "cp", "list" become "ls" and so on.  An artifact from the days when people in flares and tie-dies had to type instructions in on a 110 baud mechanical teletype machine.

Finally, I refute your assertion that you can get by in Linux without the CLI.  I've not managed more than fifteen minutes with any distro from a fresh install before I need to open the bloody bonnet and get the spanners out.

I have to agree with EMP on this one. If you want to add pretty much any software and get that software to a stable state you have to use the CLI. 
Want to do anythibg out if the ordinary (sat prat about with a programming language) and you are immersed in the Cli for ages to get it working.
Now I've used Unix/Linux since the early 90s so it doesn't scare me but it's still a pain in the arse.
The problem is, is that it is an OS written by geeks for geeks.
Apple have gotten it right having created a decent front end to Open-BSD, the Unix shell is there if you need/want it but hidden to the rest if the world.

Phil_aka_Pip

Myranda said:

Well, CLI will be dead when with a mouse click you can run one program, outputting its results into a second program, filter that some how, then output that to a third while setting certain variables to alter/manipulate that then output to a text file... 

^ This ^

I never knew you could do so little with a computer until I discovered Microsoft.

@Emp_Fab I suppose you think you should be able to play a guitar without learning such dullities as chord arpeggio and scale shapes ... well, I suppose you can but you'll probably progress no further than playing punk

Emp_Fab

I have muscle memory for the (admittedly probably very similar) runs that I do on the guitar.  I don’t know scale shapes or chord arpeggios and I don’t play punk.  You can do a hell of a lot just playing by ear without really knowing what’s you’re doing from a technical perspective.

Your argument is flawed though.  You are comparing the ability to play guitar well by knowing scales and arpeggios etc to the ability to operate a Linux machine proficiently by learning the Hebrew that is the Linux CLI.

The difference is that I don’t want to be the Django of Linux. I’d be happy with being the Bert Weedon Book 1 of Linux, but, unlike Windows, you get to page three and it’s up with the bonnet time.

What I need is a video explanation of the file system of Linux (tech books render me comatose in minutes), what the basic commands are and who is this bloody Colonel is who keeps needing to be updated ?

As @Axe_meister said, it’s an OS written by geeks for geeks, and if there’s one immutable truth it’s this;  Geeks have the communication skills of a 90yr old Glaswegian whose lost his false teeth after 16 pints.  Those who know Linux can’t speak “Layperson” and those that can speak Layperson know sod all about Linux.

Emp_Fab

Right - I've talked myself into giving it another go.  I'm picking my favourite again - Manjaro, a distro that is now hot on the heels of Mint for the top slot on Distrowatch.  Last time I tried it, it was about 10th or something.  I've opted for the GNOME desktop as it claims to be the most user-friendly.  I'm running it in a VM on my Win10 laptop.  I'm going in......

I'll predict I'll be back shortly with some new swear words.

Bridgehouse

@Emp_Fab  - think of it in guitar terms.

Stock production guitars are like a GUI - all the same, user friendly and you get what you get. 

A custom build can be complicated to spec out and you really need to take the time to work out all your choices. Linux gives you so many options, and lets you get right into it at command line - so very customisable, but more complex.

Horses and courses I think

digitalscream

Emp_Fab said:

What I need is a video explanation of the file system of Linux (tech books render me comatose in minutes), what the basic commands are and who is this bloody Colonel is who keeps needing to be updated ?

I'll do you one better - a guide you can bookmark which tells you exactly what everything does:

http://downtoearthlinux.com/posts/the-essential-guide-to-the-linux-filesystem/

...while referring to Windows where necessary.

Axe_meister

What gets up my goat with Linux/Unix variants are the inconsistencies.
One one system software is installed to /etc on another to/var on another somewhere completely different.
If you want a user friendly Unix variant then get MacOS, or use PowerShell/bash under windows 10