As someone who is now retired, & have come to PCs late in life, I HAVE seen DOS, but not used it familiarly, though can find directories & IP addresses
My problem with the command line is fairly well highlighted by the nature of the defenders of it, PLEASE allow for the fact that people do NOT publish a quicklist of useful commands, and a concise explanation of what it does – simple as that, really
I like the mathematician’s answer, and relate to it, as I don’t know Windows shortcuts, let alone bash ones
So, to get more converts – publish good, everyday, working examples, please
Jinklebert

And I couldn’t agree more. But, then, I also don’t watch television, I shout at the radio from time to time (okay, all the time), and I’d rather ride my bike than drive–and I’m a sysadmin by trade: It is a losing battle; and all an ‘alt’ type can ever hope for is a few allies in the world. And few converts.

I personally would not expect the average user to get their hands dirty, so to speak. But, sadly, this aversion to adventure, or fear of the unknown, or whatever, exists even among those whom you’d expect should be masters. The masters come from this culture, after all. So, we see sysadmins who make a good show of knowing a thing or two, but it turns out they only know how to read a manual (handed to them by the supervisor), click through some menus and reboot! Oh, well. Job security, I guess.

-miimno

I think the argument isn’t that using the desktop is somehow bad, but that people seem to reject using the command line even when it makes more sense. This is very true of computer professionals as well.

If I’m looking for something on the LAN, running Windows, I don’t bother finding and clicking “My network places”, then “Entire Network”, then “Windows network”, then wait, then find and click the appropriate domain, then wait, then search for the correct server, and only then be able to double-click the server and see which shares are available.

Instead, I hit the “Windows” key, then Run (or the shortcut to the above, Windows key + R), then start typing in the name of the server I’m looking for. Typically, Windows start searching for matches, and long before I finish typing the server name, it’s presenting it as a possible match. Between the auto-complete offered by the “Run” dialog and my own knowledge of what I’m looking for, I can find what I’m looking for usually by the time a GUI-only user is looking for the correct domain to click.

And this is in Windows, which doesn’t have a decent command line. But you take advantage of what you have.

So why don’t more people do this? Primarily, because it LOOKS like it’s harder.

Of course, probably the main reason to learn the command line is that it’s a short step from there to being able to write a script to accomplish the same goal, which you or someone else can just run, or create as an icon that just requires a double-click to execute in the future.

I’m a mathematician–you’d think I could manage analytical processing. But all the tutorials I run across either assume more knowledge than I have of computing, or have so many commands to learn before anything I would ever want to DO shows up that it’s difficult to see how the CLI is anything better than knowing all the metakey-LETTER combinations that you’d use… well, working from the desktop.

I try to remember that keyboards and CRT’s were innovations not so long ago and there’s someone out there who thought I wasn’t a real professional for needing them then.

Many of the best programs available for Linux and Unix offer greater power,
efficiency, flexibility and choice in exchange for the responsibility, on the
user’s part, to learn how to use them properly. As an author whose name I’ve
forgotten put it, if anyone were to invent a user interface as powerful as
that of Vi, but without requiring the investment in learning, this would be a
major advance in user interface design. So far, this hasn’t happened, and
there’s nothing like it on the horizon either. My intuition is that this is
probably a necessary trade-off, and the Linux/Unix tradition is one of the few
places in which one has a choice to take the higher road – the shell and its
utilities, Emacs or Vi, TeX/LaTeX instead of a word processor, editing
configuration files instead of pointing and grunting, etc. Were it not that
way, I think Linux would lose a significant portion of its users, not to
mention its developers.

I also think it would be valuable if more people were to appreciate the
possibilities. This will require education and encouragement, and as you
suggest, it runs contrary to much of what proprietary interests demand, in
emphasizing ease of learning over everything else – as though learning is
difficult and to be resisted whenever possible – hardly the message that
encourages an informed, literate and thoughtful culture of the kind we need to
confront present and future challenges.