it just occured to me. Did ppl resist when Xorg et al. came out? "no no no CLI is all you need, dont waste the processing power" ???
That's entirely likely...
There will always be someone around that resists change...
Likely? You kidding me? Was there ever...
As someone who's .xinitrc is in it's entirety to this day can be summarized as: "insert-wm-here & xterm"... Look, it's not me resisting the change, I embrace change, it's change resisting me!!!
But seriously what drove me, for example, to use X in Linux
at all during the early days was Mosaic. Later Netscape. What else was there that would have offered an advantage? Xv? Matlab plots? I can't even remember that well anymore what I used... all I know is the programs that existed were quite crude even compared to Windows 3.1 (the practically only alternative).
And it wasn't XOrg those days, XOrg came later... And OSF/Motif was something you bought if you wanted it. I didn't use a Window manager, actually. Not using one caused some problems (popups etc.). I had a neat setup where ALT-F7 was the browser. ALT-F1 was my "own work". ALT-F2 was irc... etc.
And you know, my usage of dwm reflects this setup a lot to this day. The advantage it offers is stuff like copypaste between terminals and... well... copypaste between terminals...
It worked back then, it works now.
Whenever I start computing, for example coding, I head over to such a setup. OSX and Windows are "apprunners" for me, they are not a
computing environment for me. They are the place where I can run software I buy and they are the OS I boot to be "compatible with everyone".
EDIT: There are still people that swear by commandline for everything. (I agree commandline is very powerful and especially useful for scripting tasks etc...)
Sometimes things are easier to do in a GUI and sometimes quicker to do in commandline > if you know what you are doing.
When it comes to
computing related tasks (as opposed to making music, making movies, making images, making <insert-a-non-computer-related-hobby-here>) a command line is almost always faster
provided you know the spells in advance. These days the problems stem from programs assuming no-one wants to use the command line for things. This is especially true for large companies like Microsoft, who have only recently introduced, for example, the obviously needed capability to remove programs via command line (now at last possible via PowerShell). And then made things like that such a pain-in-the-butt that you have to have good reason to want to do it... Both Windows and OSX programs pretty much assume you want to use a mouse. Linux offers some minor relief from that. Nothing annoys me more than having to lift my hands from the keyboard to click an "OK" popping up.
But there
is a lot of genuine "not getting it" involved in "overvaluing" the command line. One prime example is the Apple full text indexing introduced in MacOSXWasIt4or5Can'tRemember. Spotlight thingy. Since that was introduced I practically stopped using the OSX search completely. I tried to use it initially. Partially because when I use OSX or Windows, I try to be "pure" with them and not mess too much with the working environment. But there were things I did not like in Spotlight and I can't honestly even remember what they were anymore. Lack of control was one for sure. Another one was that I always knew roughly where to look. I do not loose files very deep. Instead, a good old "find . -exec grep -H texttofind \{} \; | less" is something that comes from my spine in a flow.
And since there's always a terminallike thing on whatever computer I use open, it is also quite universal...
I remember spending quite a few hours trying to make Windows and OSX
into what I like, then basically just giving up and leaving that to the one environment that bends: Linux. So, using Windows or OSX is like driving a mate's car: Can be done, must be done to get the drunken dude home. But you don't actually enjoy it really, it just needs to be done? It's not
your car.
