63: Linux Onboarding

Ulfnic goes on a rant

I think the terminal is the great unifier because the interface is distro agnostic, errors tend to be clearer and it’s easier to share with someone the steps to reproduce or fix a problem.

Also while BASH is usually the default shell there’s close to zero difference between BASH, ZSH, Fish, pure POSIX shells, ect for entering commands interactively because there’s rarely a reason to leave the POSIX compatibility layer (or whatever Fish thinks POSIX is).

Things diverge a lot when you’re scripting but people tend to gravitate to #!/bin/sh or #!/bin/bash so regardless of the shell the script is executed in a POSIX compliant shell or BASH.

It’s also (imho) the true power of Linux lurking beneath the GUI. Being FOSS and, “like Windows but without the spyware” is what got me to move but the terminal is what completely changed the game.

Ulfnic realizes he was wrong

BUT…

I needed GUI-only when I first moved to Linux and learning BASH felt like falling down a well.

It was a trap, Ulfnic still on rant

What i’d love to see is an embrace of the terminal as something that’s never mandatory but everything is getting you ready for. So software should be built for the terminal first around the UNIX philosophy so when a GUI is built for it the commands that do XYZ can be mapped to the interface 1 to 1 which in turn makes it easier to show the user what command they just ran when they clicked a button.

Another advantage is it brings in some of that terminal unification into GUI space because now the user has the command that failed and hopefully the useful errors that came with it.