The point about shells has already been made, but some people have got a bit sidetracked. Shells are command-interpreters; they mediate between the user and the kernel. Applications in Unix, as has already been said, get to run because a shell is spawned by the fork() system process. This is as true for GUI applications as for command-line text ones.
KDE, which I am using now, gets going on my distro with a "startx" shell-script. The name may vary from system to system, and you are encouraged to hack the basic script so as to customize it and have it run more smoothly. Without the shell-script, KDE would not run. If you do a grep '#\!\/bin\/sh" of, say, "/usr/bin/" you will find: a) Many shell-scripts (circa 200 on my system). b) That the string is embedded in many more binary images, because fork() spawns a shell by splitting to get the process going (roughly speaking). Without a shell of some kind, therefore, a user of applications would be, effectively, dumb and blind. You wouldn't even be able to access, on the fly, data produced by the kernel, which, to continue the metaphor, would be under a 24-hour lock-down in an isolation cell. Whether you use GUI applications or text-based ones is a matter of preference, and is determined by what you are trying to do. I do a lot of writing up, and am quite happy using "emacs" in a virtual text terminal, since it's bigger than Xemacs. I also do a lot of text-formatting, and for this I use the virtual terminal for the writing and markup, and "xdvi" or some PS/PDF viewer for looking at the results. The virtual terminals in Linux suit this kind of operation perfectly. Writing code is, I find, also easier on a command-line terminal, unless, of course, the code is for driving some kind of graphics interface; even then, first you've got to get the stuff to compile. Anyway, Linux has both. And arguments about Holden versus Ford don't tend to get you anywhere, unless the current model of one make is really off. When I started using computers, electrical engineers in a university department that specialized, of all things, in image processing thought bitmap screens, in particular, and graphics, in general, were a bit of a joke. In one sense, how wrong they were! In another, their principal problem was how to process data from a radio telescope and displaying the results prettily was the least of their problems. Cheers, Malcolm Johnston -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
