On Sun, Jan 22, 2017 at 9:34 AM, Rick Moen via luv-main <luv-main@luv.asn.au> wrote:

The best very advice to novices, IMO, is to get to know standard Unix console tools, because they'll be consistently useful across diverse systems and across decades, while the other stuff is here today, something wildly different tomorrow.

A clear "yes and no";-) In my case my "rpm and FreeBSD infested brain" was on holidays and was about to update the only "apt-get driven" system I have around at the moment. So, what is the command line tool I have to learn? A lot of command line tools, and technologies, vary over time, and not only between distributions and Unix flavours. I am still used to ifconfig but a minimal install under Red Hat does not even has it. It was easier because it was available everywhere, I still have to lookup some details, occasionally, because my brain does not keep all details in mind (Which system needs a "gw" in the route add command? Which netstat options do I have under Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris? What systemd commands do I have to learn now?..) Fortunately there are manpages (oops, the Red Hat minimal install does not..) On top of it, I know how many users baulk if you give them a terminal. Just instruct a stereotypical office worker over the phone to open the command line under Windows. Okay, how? "Go to search, type "cmd" and press enter." "I have a black box with "C:\blabla written in it. What does it do?" And then you have to dictate every space and dot when you ask for "ping 1.2.3.4" and if you are lucky the user types "ping1dot2dot3dot4" and gets a "Command not found" (Do not laugh, I do not make it up..) So, you already scare 50+% of the population away with your advice. Anyway, a few Unix GUI tools I used ages ago showed "how to do it right", I think. There was Nextstep. It was possible to do a lot of things on the GUI to run a Nextstep network. I also used the command line, but I had to deal with a heterogeneous network, with Solaris and NIS+ etc. Definitely more than "Novice use". I used niload and nidump etc. and it all felt very natural because it has a behaviour very close to the treatment of /etc files, so it was not a re-invention of the wheel. Nextstep gave me an idea how to integrate the admin tools in the GUI under Unix. I have not touched MacOS X for a while but the spirit seems to live there. My kids never use the command line, I believe. I also loved AIX's smitty. It is actually a tool to learn administration, if you like. It is menu-driven but it explains what it will do if you execute it. I have to admit that I am not the one to complain about GUI admin tools that much (I do not use them, in general, and I am not the one who will write them) but I still think they could be better. Regards Peter

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

On 23/01/17 04:31, Peter Ross via luv-main wrote:

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)

Peter, Not sure which desktop you have installed, but I'm guessing you were running synaptic (a gui for the package manager). In synaptic you would typically press the refresh button (Brian mentioned this) to update the package list, you shouldn't need to use the command line. I know in the past synaptic would also notify the user when newer packages were available (at least under gnome), so it must have been automatically doing updates (perhaps on startup?). There is an option in the preferences to change whether the updates are automatic. If this is a machine you are using for yourself as a desktop (or experimentation), it would be worth at some point upgrading to Debian 8 (which is about two years old now), or even Debian 9 which is likely to come out in a few months. I agree that novice users shouldn't need to use the command line for basic functionality; if I was able to replicate your issue on a current version of Debian then a bug/feature report would be in order. regards, Glenn -- pgp: 833A 67F6 1966 EF5F 7AF1 DFF6 75B7 5621 6D65 6D65