Beginners, Geeks and Appliance Users

Traditionally l, Linux is often referred to as the geek’s OS. It still is, but it has evolved to the point where many distros are quite usable by average people as a general purpose OS’s. I find it somewhat annoying that some technical sites such as distrowatch.com refer to these OS’s as beginners OS’s. The word beginner implies the start of a journey leading to more advanced concepts. Indeed, go to the homepages of Ubuntu, Zorin, Elementary and others and notice that they do not refer to themselves as beginner .The semantic confusion is the result of how the Linux OS’s were developed. Early releases did not have graphical interfaces (GUI) and were controlled from the command line. Only geeks relied on the command line. They were of the opinion that that one could be a Linux user only if one were proficient on the command line. That is, Linux is the geeks OS.

Computers have evolved to the point that consumers are purchasing them as appliances. They expect everything to simply work out of the box with further adjustment. They know that a terminal exists, but that is for geeks, and they, personally, are not likely to ever use it. The distinction between geeks and appliance users is clear. Geeks use the command line. It appears that what the geeks are labeling beginners distros are those that are attempting to be appliances.

All beginners distros have a file Manager. The file managers graphically replaces operations that would otherwise be done with the CLI. Replacing the keyboard with a mouse may or may not simplify some options. It’s largely a matter of personal preference. But, the command line also offers some utilities. For example, nano is an excellent text editor launched from the command line. To be a command line expert would take some time. Fortunately, mastering a handful of the most useful commands will be extremely helpful to you. To this end I have attached a booklet TLCL