Hi Rick, just in short. Maybe the way I wrote distorted the message I wanted to send. On Sun, Jan 22, 2017 at 10:03 PM, Rick Moen via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:
Quoting Peter Ross (petrosssit@gmail.com):
Just instruct a stereotypical office worker over the phone to open the command line under Windows.
I'm sorry, weren't we talking about "novice users" (which you put in scare quotes to indicate the ironic nature of your reference) needing to resort to apt-get rather than a DE-based graphical package-operations tool? Thus, you were speaking of a root-account-using system administrator. So, why are you suddenly changing the subject to 'a stereotypical office worker', Peter?
Because the desktop is aiming for the average user who is not an admin. Certainly I can get my head around various distributions, tool replacements etc. because I administrate servers. The desktop is more of an exception. Occasionally I am curious to figure out what I can do with it, the average user in mind. You need a GUI tool "masking" the technicalities If you want average users to have a Linux/Unix desktop at home, I believe. Think of someone who is used to start Windows Update and gets a tool where he clicks the Update button. You do not make a new friend with telling him to use wuauclt. apt-get and yum etc. are on the same level, and of no interest for users who just want to update their desktop. It really surprised me that the GUI was not sufficient to replace the command line here. I suspected a more obscure problem when I wrote the mail (and was a bit embarrassed when I realized that the stock-standard use of apt-get is fixing my problem, btw) Cheers Peter