First observation:
The Download Linux page is presumably only for x86 users. What about ARM? The only Linuxes I am currently using are Raspbian and Manjaro-ARM.
Heresy:
There were motorcars with running-boards right up until World War II. I am not suggesting that the commandline will ever be obsolete, but in my book a comfortable user-interface makes use of the keyboard as unnecessary and infrequent as possible. And, in case you are wondering, I loathe the swipe and gesture user-interfaces of mobile phones and tablets, to which my sausagelike digits have never adapted. They make irrecoverable inadvertent actions too easy. Give me a mouse, with at least three buttons, and a decent graphical user-interface. A good GUI should support a consistent graphical metaphor for filing systems, and obey the classical principle that every user-action invokes an immediate graphical response. No more whirling activity-icons that suddenly stop, leaving the user in doubt as to whether the requested activity is actually in progress or the computer has locked up. On my system you never need to enter a file's pathname; you simply SHIFT-drag the file's icon onto the page where you want to write it. One of the purposes of a desktop is to enable the user to consult many documents simultaneously while entering data into others. That is why a good GUI should never conflate the input-window with the top of the graphical stack. My difficulty with commandlines is that I have a poor memory for commands and options. By the time I have closed the man page I have forgotten its contents. Admittedly, that is my fault, not the computer's, but, despite all the computing power now available, GUIs are no better than those of 30 years ago. I presume that this is because programming GUIs is hard, and the market conditions for their development mostly work in the wrong direction.
I hope to learn many things from this forum, but I fear that my heretical views may not be received with sympathy or that I may cause offence. Having got used to doing things in a particular way, I may be a poorer student than one has never done them in any way.
The Download Linux page is presumably only for x86 users. What about ARM? The only Linuxes I am currently using are Raspbian and Manjaro-ARM.
Heresy:
There were motorcars with running-boards right up until World War II. I am not suggesting that the commandline will ever be obsolete, but in my book a comfortable user-interface makes use of the keyboard as unnecessary and infrequent as possible. And, in case you are wondering, I loathe the swipe and gesture user-interfaces of mobile phones and tablets, to which my sausagelike digits have never adapted. They make irrecoverable inadvertent actions too easy. Give me a mouse, with at least three buttons, and a decent graphical user-interface. A good GUI should support a consistent graphical metaphor for filing systems, and obey the classical principle that every user-action invokes an immediate graphical response. No more whirling activity-icons that suddenly stop, leaving the user in doubt as to whether the requested activity is actually in progress or the computer has locked up. On my system you never need to enter a file's pathname; you simply SHIFT-drag the file's icon onto the page where you want to write it. One of the purposes of a desktop is to enable the user to consult many documents simultaneously while entering data into others. That is why a good GUI should never conflate the input-window with the top of the graphical stack. My difficulty with commandlines is that I have a poor memory for commands and options. By the time I have closed the man page I have forgotten its contents. Admittedly, that is my fault, not the computer's, but, despite all the computing power now available, GUIs are no better than those of 30 years ago. I presume that this is because programming GUIs is hard, and the market conditions for their development mostly work in the wrong direction.
I hope to learn many things from this forum, but I fear that my heretical views may not be received with sympathy or that I may cause offence. Having got used to doing things in a particular way, I may be a poorer student than one has never done them in any way.