On Mon, 2005-10-03 at 15:58 +0800, "國產 Wei-Yee Chan (Made in Chinar)"
wrote:
One of the reasons why Windoze users are so hesitant about switching
to
Linux is that they fear having to use the command line. If Linux is to
win users over, it'd have to go the GUI way. Let me tell U a story.
More than ten years ago, I was using WordPerfect 5.0 and a uni mate was
using MS Word. I thought that I was smarter as WordPerfect was much
harder use, whereas MS Word was merely a matter of point-and-click. The
fact is, my uni mate could churn out a piece of work in a fraction of
the time that I could, even though she was what we called, a "computer
illiterate".
Personally, I think that doing things the GUI way is more efficient.
There's this package that I use everyday that requires me to compile a
source rpm everytime I upgrade the kernel, and anytime I need to use it,
I have to key in a very long command. Now, wouldn't a GUI version be
simpler and more efficient for the user?
Point taken
However I feel like I have to point out that there are drawbacks to a
GUI interface, sometimes it can be ~~too~~ easy to do something
unintended. I'll give you an example:
Contrast MySQL, command line, with MSSQL, GUI
I had a friend who decided to rename a table in MSSQL. So he right
clicked on the table name, and went down to rename on the context menu.
His fingers glitched, and he clicked on the item above rename which
happened to be delete, table was gone. Had he not had a backup, it
would have been ugly.
Had he been working in MySQL from the command like, I do not think he
would have made the same mistake. Its hard to type DROP TABLE, when you
mean RENAME TABLE.
Food for thought
Micheal