On Monday 09 September 2002 06:23 am, Colin Walls wrote: > > Is it as "user friendly"? No. > > UNIX is user friendly - it is just very particular who its friends are.
Let's understand that "ease of use" and "efficiency of use" are orthogonal concepts. In a GUI, it is very "easy" to navigate through the directories to find a file called "abc-xyz_123.zip" and move it to a particular location. Now, suppose you wanted to search a directory tree containing 4500 files, find every file that contains either "xyz_123" or "xyz_124" in its name, and move them all to a new directory. The GUI is still easier. Just point and click and drag and point and click and drag and point and click and drag -- until your arm falls off from fatigue! With command shell, a simple "find" command can do this in seconds, with just a hundred or so keystrokes total. Ease of use comes into play for unfamiliar or seldom-done tasks, while efficiency of use is critical for familiar tasks that need to be accomplished quickly and often. UNIX-like operating systems not only deliver a powerful GUI and a powerful command shell, but they also allow in-the-field replacement of either or both of these components, even on a per-user basis, without breaking the underlying commonality of the operating system and its filesystems. It is possible, with minimal effort, to have novice users login to an "easy" graphical environment while advanced users login to a minimalist GUI that emphasizes close coupling to the "efficient" command shell. And this can happen on a single system for both classes of user. I jokingly call myself a command-line curmudgeon, because I do in fact prefer the shell prompt for much of what I do. But I'm only half serious -- plenty of my work is done in KDE, by choice. The point is that using the right tool for the job -- something I hope we all can agree is a Good Thing -- implies that if you are doing a wide variety of jobs you will need a wide variety of tools in the box. UNIX and Linux, by providing both GUI *and* shell, offer a wider variety of tools than the Microsoft alternative. Because of these factors, I reject the conventional wisdom that Windows is intrinsically more productive than UNIX. Just because a few million people who have never used anything *other* than Windows think it is the best, does not make it so. I prefer to make my own informed choices, and having tried both Windows and UNIX-like systems, I wholeheartedly choose the latter. Scott -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Scott D. Courtney, Senior Engineer Sine Nomine Associates [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sinenomine.net/
