I can recall a situation in one of my first experiences with linux where I wound up rebooting a machine because I couldn't figure out how to get out of vim.

My first vi experience was on a Unix terminal in a CS laboratory with a lot of people doing serious work and I just hitting keys to see if ANYTHING could take me away from that and the thing just BEEEPed...

But isn't that a good reason to learn the smallest basics of vim? Maybe it's just me, but after I had my first bad experience with vim, I tried learning the basics so that would never happend again.

Since this is a guide for linux, this is a natural step in the linux learning :)