“‘I’m a command line kinda guy.’ This remark emerged during a
conversation regarding the advantages and disadvantages of various
Linux distributions. One man described how SuSE left mistaken
changes to it’s init files causing OS confusion. Another said that
he had found that RedHat did the same while configuring the X
server. ‘Oh, well, that I don’t know about. I’m a command line
kinda guy.’ Now, this is not pompous, this is the crux of the
matter. That Linux is powerful and extensible is not even suspect.
But, is that power available through the X Windows systems or on
the command line, or both.”
“I had another conversation with a man who described how his
son, interested in Linux, had, he thought, he wasn’t sure,
installed the OS, perhaps, because, as he put it, his son after the
installation said, ‘Now what do I do?’ Faced with, ‘darkstar~#’, as
the prompt on your screen, this is a decent question. What do you
do now? Some of us will remember that exact feeling when we first
installed, say DOS 2.2 and were faced with the ‘c>’ prompt. (A
version prior to the ‘C>’ prompt.)”