> As computer lovers, I feel we must endeavour to remain mindful that almost everyone else aren’t like us. They’re trying to get a task done. They don’t want to maintain or talk with the computer.
This was pretty much my point. 95% of the population isn't like us, and don't need to interact with the terminal; thus, thinking the terminal is what's keeping Linux back doesn't make much sense to me
The larger issue is the times that the Linux UX goes off the rails and the solution turns out to be "You're going to have to bleat this esoteric incantation at the command line." I plugged my laptop into a second monitor the other day and, oops, for whatever Godforsaken reason it didn't auto-detect. Suddenly I'm munging around in `xrandr` to get my screens to work.
To its credit, all the major desktop distributions today are making real inroads to narrowing the scope of situations where that happens. This was a much larger concern in the past, where key aspects of the user experience were still in the category "There was a command-line tool written to control it and that's all you'll ever need, dammit."
The alternative is "it just won't work". You too can live in that world by simply not trying to fix it.
My wife's Macbook won't suspend correctly when it's plugged into a Dell monitor, the monitor going into power save wakes up the laptop. I wish there was an arcane incantation that would fix it, but no, the proprietary walled garden is well locked up, with glossy user-friendly rounded corners everywhere.
This is the most insightful post in the thread -- there's definitely a false dichotomy here. It's not "have to use a terminal" vs "everything works without a need for a terminal ever" -- it's "able to use a terminal to accomplish some goal or recover from Really Bad Thing" vs "Can't Do That Thing / have to factory restore to recover".
Like the way Apple Maps on my iPhone can't save the person to notify when I navigate to Home. I can save a person to be notified to any arbitrary location besides Home. With Home though, the setting simply doesn't save. I'm sure if I had a terminal I could inspect the data involved and manually fix what's wrong, but the 'Apple' or GUI-only approach simply makes that out of the question. Even better, when the corrupted data is cloud-resident I think the answer is often just that it's broken permanently unless you want to create a brand new account.
There are millions of computers out there that just don't work right, or where people can't accomplish some goal they wish they could. That's the flip side of the 'terminal or not' coin. Neither is a good experience for users who aren't technical though. For nerds though the Terminal provides a great deal.
I think my main gripe though is that there simply isn't enough drive to move things out of the terminal and into a GUI.
I really think that a core problem is that once you are in a position where you are contributing to distros, contributing to the kernal, you are well versed and acquainted with the terminal, and you love it's incredible power and efficiency. The cockpit is no longer a sci-fi meme, it's a meticulous masterpiece granting a god-like computing interface. Nobody at that level is interested in much GUI-ification, because, holy shit, this CLI is the best! (Never mind that software engineering is dominated by "complexity and control" types vs "simplicity and automatic" types of the wider population.)
In general, Apple would solve that problem by recommending you plug an Apple computer into an Apple monitor.
The Apple ecosystem is well incentivized to make all of their pieces work with their other pieces. The Windows ecosystem is pretty decently incentivized to make things work together in general (In both directions... Windows suffers in sales if there's some popular hardware it won't work with, and popular hardware suffers in sales if it doesn't work with Windows).
One certainly does run into the occasional Dell monitor with Apple laptop problem that you then need a couple of insider specialists to address. But I've not really been sold on the notion that The open ecosystem is strictly superior in that sense... In theory it is, in practice you can't be an expert at everything and there's no guarantee anyone's going to come along and care about how to fix your particular Dell / Linux distro configuration.
How does the monitor thing relate to what I was saying? In my case, I'm saying that Apple's tightly-coupled, app-OS-cloud integration means I have no ability to see what's wrong (and I'm positive the minimum wage phone support guys will not be able to escalate a bug like that to Engineering and get it fixed). My point was even first-party walled garden stuff doesn't work right, and having no access beneath the GUI rules out anyone outside being able to fix it. I get your point though that the 'right person' who could use that access to more obscure things may be rare anyways.
This was pretty much my point. 95% of the population isn't like us, and don't need to interact with the terminal; thus, thinking the terminal is what's keeping Linux back doesn't make much sense to me