> least half a dozen times that the command line
> isn't the issue. It's the general
> anti-userfriendliness mentality in the *nix
> community. I just

I think you're generalizing here.  First off, there are assholes in any
community; I've said before that I don't honestly think that we have
more assholes in the Linux community than anywhere else -- we do,
however, have a lot more people willing to take the time to respond to
people's questions, and a lot of those people probably shouldn't
because they're not very compassionate.  However, to be fair, most of
them are tired of having people too lazy to do any research before
complaining in some public forum about how much this-or-that
application sucks.  And in most of those cases, the person asking the
question is themself frustrated with not being able to do what they
want.  What we need is an infinitely patient Eliza for Linux questions;
what would be a more practical solution is for American schools to
start teaching people how to learn rather than how to regurgitate,
since I'd bet that a large percentage of the complainers are US
citizens.  But I digress...

In any case, the other issue is of usability.  You say that the shell
isn't the real issue -- then what is?  KDE?  Gnome?

There are a lot of really good, well designed, user friendly Linux
applications out there.  I'd say, even, that user friendly applications
in Linux are the rule, rather than the exception, so I entirely reject
your proposition that the *nix community is "anti-userfriendly".  There
*are* poorly designed applications, and few applications have really
outstanding interfaces, but by and large, they're no worse than most
applications for any platform you choose to compare them against.

Caveat: NeXTSTEP was, in my opinion, the pinnacle of user interfaces.
It had, perhaps, the perfect UI.  What made it so good was a feature
that is an afterthought in most systems: the ability to drag-and-drop
anything *from* any application *to* any application, and have it do
something reasonable.  It was *integrated*, and it turned the GUI from
just a fancy application switcher into something useful.  OpenSTEP
mimics the API and the look of NeXTSTEP, but that clipboard support was
the killer feature of NS, and it is part of the reason why KDE enjoys
so much success -- there are a lot of applications, and they by and
large respect the DnD API.

--- SER

Tyler Zesiger wrote:
> I don't know how much of the thread you read through, but I repeated
at
> least half a dozen times that the command line isn't the issue. It's
the
> general anti-userfriendliness mentality in the *nix community. I just

> started with "cp" as an example.
>
>
>
> SER wrote:
>
> >>I remember when I first started using linux (now I use FreeBSD,
which
> >>is no better in this regard), I spent an hour trying to figure out
> >
> > how
> >
> >>to copy a file..."copy" didn't work. Searching the internet for
info
> >
> > on
> >
> >>"copying" didn't turn up anything, probably because Google wasn't
> >>what it is now, back then. I had to finally get on IRC and ask
> >
> > someone how
> >
> >>to copy - Turns out it's "cp". It will take me a decade of typing
> >
> > "cp",
> >
> >>with it's two fewer letters than "copy", to earn back the hour it
> >>took me to figure out the command in the first place.
> >
> >
> > I know exactly what you mean, because "dir" and "del" in DOS are
*so*
> > intuitive.  In fact, "copy" is also elitist; "duplicate" is even
more
> > user friendly.
> >
> > All sarcasm aside, I don't think anything short of a decent AI
> > interpreter will make the command line "user friendly".  There's a
> > threshold before which trying to make things more user friendly is
> > counter productive -- you don't really save most people any time
> > learning the system (except in a few edge cases), and you make
things
> > more painful on a day-to-day basis for people who already know the
> > system.  Beyond that threshold, of course, a system *can* be user
> > friendly enough to make the extra typing worthwhile.  I'd *love* to
be
> > able to tell my system, in plain English (or German, or French, or
> > Esperanto) "Open the most recent version of my resume in
openoffice".
> > Anything less than that is just optimizing the syntax for a select
> > group, and Linux (and Unix) chooses that group to be people who use
the
> > shell enough to appreciate the fewer keystrokes.
> >
> > If you don't agree with me, odds are *really* good that you've
never
> > played Zork.  I'm not the first to argue that that trying to make
> > things more natural is worse than not trying at all if you can't
meet
> > that threshold.
> > 
> > --- SER
> > 
> > 
> > 
> >