maemo.org - Talk - View Single Post - tutorial on basic command line use?

	Copernicus	2012-03-22 , 22:33
	Posts: 1,986 \| Thanked: 7,698 times \| Joined on Dec 2010 @ Dayton, Ohio	#20

Originally Posted by gryvn

I love grungy and hands-on, but I kinda like to know what I'm getting into. I've fallen into some stuff here that's very complex and time-consuming that was evidently presented as a solution to some basic user needs, but which proved to be advanced and byzantine and has me setting up server/client heavy artillery to shoot at flies, so to speak.

I feel your pain; I think everybody who codes for a living runs into this more than you'd expect...

I love a good chewy hack but I wish there were a FEW more signposts that read "leaving practical usage territory and moving into regions where you are spending days doing stuff that's way more time consuming than the end result is worth, and which won't really solve your problem anyway". I'm not serious in that wish, I know this is the open-source universe and only the strong survive, but it's tough burning the midnight oil by the gallon when you're just trying to get some work done and just this once, don't really WANT to know how to code it yourself from scratch.

You know, it's weird; back when I started fooling with personal computers, with an Apple ][+ (and man, I guess that does mean I'm really old), the command line was the only way to deal with the machine, but since everybody focussed on it (and, to be honest, it couldn't do all that much anyway), it really was easy to work with. Now, the world has bifurcated into the Steve Jobs "a computer should be as simple as a toaster" camp and the open source "real men compile their own kernels" camp. Even the cell phone world is that way now -- you can choose iOS, or the similar Android "it's got Linux, but so heavily locked down, you'd never know it" option, or the "of course I hack my phone with my own kernel, everybody should" camp.

There really ought to be a middle-ground somewhere between a user interface based around finger-painting and one based on kernel-hacking.

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