RTFM 3371

I'll agree, and it also points up the shortcoming in the GUI

The GUI can only do what the application author thought might be necessary, and only in the way the application is set to do. Try something else, and you're out of luck. If you want to use the computer for something other than playing Quake or surfing pr0n sites, it really does become worth your effort to learn what is happening.

Another disadvantage of 'the microsoft way' is that it's incomplete. In any breed of *nix, I can pipe the output of one command to another, and so on (one of my "single line" scripts has 33 pipes and is 1040 characters long) to do things that no application author would ever think is a needed tool.

compton ~$ echo $HISTSIZE 1000 compton ~$ history sed 's-^--g' grep -v '^$' wc -c 680 compton ~$

That's actually a bit high - it's normally about 300 per thousand. But windoze doesn't have a 'tail', 'sed', 'tr', 'awk', 'cut', 'column' or any one of the thousand different commands found on a dumb *nix. You can get those commands elsewhere (well at least some of them), but the average windoze user doesn't know why they might be useful. Instead, they'll buy an application to parse their toy firewall log, or worse, will download some infected freebie, and then wonder why their computer is dialing in to some "spy" site using a connection direct through the Nigerian Telephone Company at only six dollars a minute.

I've lost track of how many "helper" tools exist for the sole purpose of setting up and running a dumb dialin connection to an ISP. Every desktop seems to have one or two, each distribution adds several more, all of them designed around the same (wrong) concept that someone saw on a late night sci-fi movie, and all using some modem init string that no modem manufacturer ever saw before. Do a google search for 'daemon died unexpectedly' which is the extent of their error message. Rather helpful in a windoze sort of way. Meanwhile, the newbie can't get help from the ISP, because they can't spell Linux and won't support it, and the newbie comes here to Usenet and is told to try $NAMEOFANOTHERUSELESSHELPER.

Old guy