My brother is 12 and just like other people of his age he can’t use a computer properly because he is only familiar with mobile devices and dumbed-down computers

I recently dual-booted Fedora KDE and Windows 10 on his laptop. Showed him Discovery and told him, “This is the app store. Everything you’ll ever need is here, and if you can’t find something just tell me and I’ll add it there”. I also set up bottles telling him “Your non-steam games are here”. He installed Steam and other apps himself

I guess he is a better Linux user than Linus Sebastian since he installed Steam without breaking his OS…

The tech support questions and stuff like “Can you install this for me?” or “Is this a virus?” dropped to zero. He only asks me things like “What was the name of PowerPoint for Linux” once in a while

After a week I have hardly ever seen my brother use Windows. He says Fedora is “like iOS” and he absolutely loved it

I use Arch and he keeps telling me “Why are you doing that nerdy terminal stuff just use Fedora”. He also keeps explaining to me why Fedora better than my “nerd OS”

  • zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev
    3·
    1 year ago

    As a terminal fan, my main reasons for preferring them over a gui (for some tasks) are:

    1. It’s faster to type than to navigate menus
    2. If I don’t know where something is and can’t guess it instantly, it’s usually faster to search for it in a man page than randomly digging through gui menus
    3. You can combine commands with each other with pipes or $()
    4. You can search through your command history to find previous commands
    5. You can write scripts and aliases to automate common tasks
    6. The terminal requires less context switching. Typing ten commands is less mentally taxing than opening ten different guis

    The barrier for entry is higher with terminals but unless you need visual feedback (e.g. because you’re editing an image) it’s easier and faster for both common and rare tasks.

    • Fonzie!@ttrpg.networkEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      To add to point 4; in most Unix terminals you can use Ctrl+R (mnemonic “reverse”) to search commands from your history, press Ctrl+R repeatedly after typing to keep going back up, start using the arrow keys to leave the search or hit [Enter] to run the result