Mint

Still enjoying Mint 17. I'm going through my usual new OS customisation processes and it's been pretty good so far. One thing I really enjoyed was being able to right-click on cairo-dock, create a custom launcher, assign the Numix round  Soulseek icon and then enter the command to run it. Et voila, soulseek shortcut in my dock!

The reason for this post is, being a slow day at work I'm looking at the Mint user guide. I have to admit, a user guide is not something I'd ever normally read for an operating system, even if one exists. In fact, I'd be judging the OS on my ability to use it without any form of instruction whatsoever. But like I say, I'm skiving and reading this pdf and I come across the following passage:

Sooner or later, though, you will probably have be in a situation which causes you to use the Terminal directly, either to access commands that are not available through any GUI, or to get a job done more efficiently. Yes, you read that right! It can be more efficient to type a single command, for certain tasks, than to open up lots of windows to achieve the same thing. The more you use it, the more you’ll come to actually like it. Remember how you didn’t like certain things when you were a kid and how you couldn’t do without them now? Terminal is one of these things. In a few weeks, you’ll be completely addicted to it. You'll begin to feel in complete control of your computer. There will be times when you won’t even have to use the Terminal, but you will anyway, because for some tasks it’s faster, more accurate, more versatile and actually simpler to use than equivalent graphical interfaces. And anyone watching you will think you're a complete pro.

I kind of thought that linux mint was aiming at that tentatively ex-windows demographic - and it is, obviously - but I'd assumed that the strategy was to "dumb-down" the interface to the windows level and abandon use of command line completely, or as much as possible.

I'm surprised and pleased to see that they're still pushing the value of the command line approach, and there's a thrill of recognition for me in the line "You'll begin to feel in complete control of your computer". This is the main thing about linux, as far as I'm concerned, and I'm happy to see that it's value hasn't been lost in a scramble to pander to the habits of a technically incurious mainstream audience.