A little common sense

In this IM conversation it has been claimed that I said certain things.

Someone's being disingenuous here. We were talking about the CLI in the context of troubleshooting, i.e. we were addressing the question of why the Ubuntu Forums have most answers in the form of a string of (seemingly meaningless) commands.

While this may sound clichéd, a GUI and a CLI both have their place. Smarter men than I have demonstrated how, but I will give you a simple example of what each is good at.

• Copying a set of files with no particular pattern to their names from one folder to another: GUI
• Extracting audio from a set of videos, and setting id3 tags using the names of the videos: CLI

Why? Because the cost (in time) of me having to list each file I want copied (even with Tab completion) is greater than just pointing and clicking, and using other advantages of the pointer (like being able to drag a box around everything I want, selecting three files that are 'in a row'). However, the thing is that each GUI tool has to be tailored to a task. Most command line tools do a task in such a way that their output can be piped to other tools, thereby creating a nice little chain of tools that does just what you want, in no time at all when you're proficient.

As for 'need to convert': What I do have to say is that I couldn't care less. Ubuntu works just fine for me, I find Windows Vista stifling and Windows XP ugly. All I want is for hardware manufacturers to do their duty - provide drivers (which the good ones do, already). I've introduced a couple of my friends to using Ubuntu, but that's only because they asked.

As for games, I give a hoot.