Re:Some Users Want Terrible User Interfaces
by habitue on Thursday March 25, 2010 @02:38PM
(#1219104)
It's actually not about jumping through hoops, it's simple math. Doing a command in a terminal is O(1). Everything is at your fingertips immediately and can be combined efficiently with everything else. Doing something in a GUI is O(n), you have to dig through menus and tabs to get at what you want, and the result is in a form that can't be recombined or filtered or modified at will.
The trade-off is that the command line takes a lot of getting used to in terms of memorizing commands etc. If you don't know any Unix commands, the terminal is almost completely useless unlike a GUI. For beginners, a GUI is a good way to explore and get a feeling for how to do things because GUIs explain themselves.
But I agree in principle with this article. You can see it sometimes in the Linux/FLOSS world. People decry anything that means the average user can use it.
"But you should know how to set up networking on the command line!"
People like that, they like jumping through hoops. They think sensible defaults are a bad thing. They think you should have to read a 1,000 page manual before doing something simple.