Hello Paul,
Am 27.02.2021 um 22:36 schrieb PaulMmn <PaulMmn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
Well, I've been learning the CLI for lo these -many- years, and for the commands I know and love, I can key it in faster than a mouse-driven programmer can get the mouse wheels moving. That's the real issue-- for newcomers to the O/S, they can (probably) mouse through the menus faster than they can press F4 to bring up the built-in help screens. But for us old *ahem* timers, the CLI is already memorized!
Yap!
GUIs have an advantage when you're required to do some (sysadmin) task you rarely do, or when you're still learning. The more fluent you get in what you do, the more the GUI gets in the way to reach a certain degree of flexibility, and speed.
My personal experience with Linux-Sysadmins is at the beginning, adding an user profile is like, OMG, how? People look into GUI provided System Settings and can achieve their task. If you need to create a dozen users, it's cumbersome. After a while I show them more and more alternate ways to do things on the command line, in the end they still use the GUI. For a number of shell windows, a web browser and a PDF viewer. Maybe an email program. But no longer to create user profiles.
I observed this same behavior in me. Around 2007, at the beginning of me learning OS/400, being a completely unknown thing to me, I tortuously brachiated through the seemingly endless levels of menus, often failing to find this dammit menu item again, and of course made heavy use of the screen forms and help texts to enter the correct information.
Today I know my toolset and (example) don't need to F4 the cpyf command to just copy one source member to another SRC PF.
It might sound pejorative, but my decades long experience taught me: The more professional (skilled) a Linux sysadmin is, the better he knows his tools, the less he clicks helplessly through the system, searching for a way to achieve a certain goal, but *knows* which commands he needs to type or concatenate with pipes to get the desired outcome. Exactly what you describe, but on another platform. But comparable, I think.
It's like data entry-- if you're going to Computers-R-Us on the web to buy one thing, you can probably get it faster clicking on various buttons than if you had to work on a command-line menu. But a -real- data entry clerk, entering dozens of orders an hour, will probably be faster on a CLI/Green Screen interface.
I also think this is right. We had this discussion in this group before, though. ;-) Allow me to add that true data entry monkeys might be really rare nowadays. (Not meant as an insult but as a description of the boringness and stupidity I perceive in doing this job.) End users less and less fill out and submit paper forms (except for government related tasks), so people converting dead trees to digital data either have been made obsolete by end users filling out forms on their own screens, or by OCR software becoming better and better over the years to automate that task.
Then there are people who barely tolerate PCs-- you know the ones-- their mouse is somewhere behind the keyboard, and every time they need to use it they re-e-a-ch across their desk to move it. No interface is going to be good for them!
Oh yes! These are my "favorites". They struggle (or most often barely fail) to understand that all that computer stuff is meant to help them doing their job more easily or efficiently. We're not the IT department (solely) for fun or to make their lives more miserable intentionally! They plainly refuse (or even realize) to learn how to use this tool to their benefit.
Once at home, they don't use a scythe but a lawn mower. In the pastime, they learned enough about that machine to refill gas, keep the air intake clean, maybe make sure the blade is tightly secured, pull the cranking rope (is this the correct term? I'm German. ;-) ) to make it go, and happily cut the grass. But refuse to do something likewise with the the PC at work.
Yes, I realize that "the PC is acting up on me" or "the dammit software just doesn't work", or "bluescreen again", or whatever is happening. Assuming that employees receive proper training (which is most often a false assumption at least in Germany), things can go wrong without their fault. And this is a frustrating experience. But this is an entirely different chapter: The (lack of) quality of today's Software…
:wq! PoC
midrange.com
