Linux turned UNIX into a free alternative, something people who should probably be using Windows, or who don’t need a computer at all, turned to when Ubuntu arrived, and now I get questions about Linux like “where do I click to turn on the wireless?” and answers like “Click the system preferences menu item, then click networking, then…”
I’m not really old enough to feel this way - I’m merely idiosyncratic - but I can’t help but think that GUIfication brought very little to the practice of running UNIX systems, except taking them backwards in time to the far-less sophisticated Macintosh user interface. Once, both the documentation and the procedure were much easier to perform, and made sense, to boot:
$ modprobe wireless-driver
$ ifconfig en0 192.168.1.14 255.255.255.0
$ ...
UNIX used to be literate. Fortunately, its scion systems, even Ubuntu, can still be used in this expressive, legible way — but it’s really only the old UNIX hands doing that. New users use them — click-click — like Windows, and never get a chance to see why “old,” textual UNIX is a different, far more proven, better way, rather than just a free knockoff to ease the pain of the abuse they’ve suffered at the hands of Microsoft.
Re-implementing the Windows desktop, and competing with it for users, is a seemingly intrinsic goal of so many free software developers (looking at you Gnome, KDE). I just don’t understand it at all. How dull. What’s the point? Especially when the development is conducted with an X11 toolkit that guarantees the results will be clunky, stuttering, and weaker than the GUI on either WIndows or Mac OS X.
“The X server is the biggest program I’ve ever seen that doesn’t do anything for you.” - Ken Thompson