Linked by Paul Hankes Drielsma on Tue 15th Apr 2003 06:40 UTC
I can't take anymore comments like "Debian/Gentoo/OpenBSD/etc. are not good/user-friendly because they lack a graphical installer." Searching the web, I couldn't find a comprehensive site describing the good and the bad about graphical installers for various OSes throughout the years, so in this article I hope to debunk a few of the myths on the basis of my own personal and professional experience.
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No! No! No! The text age should absolutely _NOT_ come to an end, at least not while I'm alive
So you like GUI's. Fine, go ahead and use a GUI-based OS, there's plenty of those around.
It's much easier to find some option in a good-designed GUI if you don't remember its exact name, than to find the same option for a CLI utility. Not all of us are blind typers, and it is generally easier to do two clicks and not to type "--option-one --option-two".
But I (and though it may well be a minority, I'm not alone on this) prefer text-based systems. Sure I do use X because some apps need to be graphical (image viewers etc.), and to be able to nicely fit a lot of xterms on my screen. But I do not want kludged and bloated GUI config tools.
And I do not kludged and bloated CLI config tools / configuration files - yes, there are such. And it's much easier to perform some little typo in a text configuration file and to make the application unusable. Or let's suppose you erroneously selected some parameters which can't be combined, e.g "A and B" and "A and C" is valid, but "A and B and C" is not, and you enabled "A and B and C". A good GUI would prevent you from doing that.
In short - GUI is not necessarily easier, but good GUI may help . OTOH, CLI is not necessarily leaner and meaner and clearer. There may be bad GUI and there may be bad CLI, neither is a panacea.
And I absolutely not want to be locked out on certain areas of the system (like M$ Windows does, and some Linux distro's are starting to go down this alley too...)
Look at it this way: Suppose you prefer wine over beer, should we all stop drinking beer?
OTOH : what would you prefer - going to a supermarket and purchasing a bottle of beer ( Windows ) or growing all the ingredients and making your own beer at home ( Linux from scratch)? In the first case, you never know what they have put in the beer and of which quality it is - but all it requires is a bit of money and a bit of time. In the second case, it requires a lot of efforts, a lot of knowledge and a lot of time - and at the end, a fair amount of money.