People speak many different languages around the world. Gimp doesn’t have a bad connotation outside small and sad group of people. A subset of English speakers only. People like that should not dictate what the rest of us, outside their bubble, do.
Businesses around the world, who have no idea what a few people use the term gimp to mean, are no different. The name makes no difference to them. To most people around the world, gimp means that photo editor.
I’m a non IT user interested in usability. I left Windows 7, on my home PC, over 10 years ago, as Linux has a good selection of Desktop Environments to choose from. So I get to try different ways of working. Windows has loads of tweaks. But no serious alternative desktops. Work PC is Windows only sadly.
Plasma has that built in.
As long as it’s easy to setup, anything would be good. After many years of asking, nobody has been able to suggest anything.
For simple screen recording, I could only find not-so-simple OBS that let me record a part of a screen. In the end it’s a good and reliable solution once you set up and save the local area I want to record. Not so spontaneous, but solid.
I edit the videos in KDEnlive Windows install, which is excellent for this work. I have a smooth process and create many videos quickly.
GUIs can have just as many options. Sure there are programs with poor UX. Choose a good one. There are also many GUIs with no CLI alternative, or only a poor UX alternative. As the GUIs guide the user, small changes are understood right away. GUIs remember last settings all the time. Great for reuse. If you have to write a command down, for GUIs it need not be perfect. For CLI one letter wrong and it fails. Using man commands is yet another command to learn and does not work with all CLI commands. It is possible to automate GUI commands.
And even if there was some benefit to a CLI, the entire UX is so poor you can understand why most people prefer GUIs. It’s the dominant way for good reason. And why most CLI users use a web browser and GUI email client.
Not at all.They are 2 ways do the same thing. The GUI can tell you what options are available. The CLI needs you to memorise them, or go somewhere else to look them up.
Thanks. I’ve tried it. But it’s not a permanent mount. The program needs to be running all the time. And it frequently times out. A very poor experience. Other OSs do much better.
Mount a network share permanently on Kubuntu. Non IT people need to do backups too. And Plasma apps can’t access network shares unless they are mounted.
On my home PC everything is FOSS. I’m a serious hobby user of Inkscape and GIMP. No advantage to using commercial alternatives.
Work PC is all commercial software. For me FOSS CAD doesn’t come close.
Definitely a help website that focuses on user level questions and not IT pro solutions is desperately needed. Today new users are immediately given misinformation by hard core Linux techies with no clue about usability or user level solutions.
Windows users have a variety of different skills and experience. I guess the most likely ones to try Linux first are not going to be the PC-fearing ultra-causal users, who probably follow what their friends do. But the more adventurous and curious ones, or IT workers.
If a user speaks a different language, good usability knowledge will tell you, change the software to help the user. Not change the user to help the software. The software is only there to make things easier for people.
As I said for many people, the tasks they do are not always possible or not easy with the CLI. Try drawing a curve, try moving an object from bottom left to a position higher up to the right. Even navigating a tree structure, common in many apps, it’s easy to click on a chosen branch directly. Even with CLI options, more people, including CLI users, feel it’s natural to use a GUI app to do their email, manage files or browse the web. There is a lot of learnability built in. Discovering new things by accident is a natural benefit. And a big downside of the CLI. Which is not THE natural way at all.
“The command line is the natural way of interacting with a computer.”
It’s not natural at all for many people. Far from it.
It’s not always *fear *of the CLI. I am not interested in memorising a whole load of unnecessary stuff I’d need, to start using a CLI, that I can already do productively with the GUIs. I’m not in IT. I know my way around GUI applications quite well. So it’s more worthwhile extending my knowledge there.
Sure there are some people who can’t do anything. But there are a large number of full time computer users not in IT who know their GUIs really well. These are candidates to switch to Linux.
If you give someone a text string to paste in, chances are they won’t be able to tell if it worked. They might need another command for that. And how can they undo that command? And the next time they need that command they’ll have to have stored that command string somewhere! Which is why it is better to show them the option in their application GUI, as the GUI will provide feedback on the status. And makes it obvious how to undo the change, and they know where to go next time. Otherwise they are dependent on you forever. Also, I doubt if there are any text commands for most things I do on a computer.
You don’t design a UI around the relatively few occasions when GUI help is too hard for some helper.
Yes. You can bork your system via the registry. But only some parts of the registry are dangerous. Changing the mouse scrolling direction as I do, hasn’t given me issues so far.
I use the Plasma app store Discover to update, upgrade, install and uninstall apps. Everything is easy. Even unpacking files and permissions are easy in the file manager. No need for CLI as I’m a home PC user.
This question just shows how messed up, and broken much of IT is.