I started out with DOS for a rather long time throughout the 1990's, and
eventually tried to make the transition to Windows 3.1, which I truly
hated once the novelty of it began to wear off. From there, I saw all
the strange errors in Windows 95, but it didn't have speech software at
the time, so I felt safe from them. Eventually, I got my own computer
running Windows ME, and cursed it because everything caused an error in
like everything. As soon as I could get it in about 2002, I got Windows
XP, and I cursed it, because they took away a lot of the DOS commands I
was used to running from within the DOS window, and it crashed out on me
as many as 3 times a week or more. It also bothered me greatly that I
couldn't find all the configuration files I was used to dealing with in
DOS, things like config.sys, and then of course there was the fact that
they eventually even made win.ini completely useless because the
registry did more and more of that kind of thing, and was much clunkier
and made things much harder to find.
Around the beginning of 2003, I saw a Unix shell for the first time. I
believe it was tcsh on a system running an old version of Red Hat Linux
that was about 2 years old at the time I used it. Suddenly, a whole new
world simply opened up in front of me, as I learned more and more
commands that were even shorter than the DOS commands I was used to
using, and the config files weren't in a YUUUUUUGE registry with
sections with odd naming conventions, but were instead in a file and
directory structure I could understand. I recall thinking of Linux as
DOS on steroids. At the time, no screen reader existed that worked with
X Windows, also called the X Window System, with GNOME and KDE as the
two choices of graphical desktops, but it didn't matter to me, as I was
where I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to do, working with something
that was kinda like DOS, but so much better, and didn't crash either.
Fast forward about 6 months, and I learned of something called
Gnopernicus, that was supposed to allow me to use GNOME. It wasn't all
that great, and I still couldn't do my online banking with it, as it
didn't work that well with Firefox just yet, but it was a start, and I
was able to do some pretty simple stuff with it. But still, I did stay
mostly in text mode for a long time, even through most of the short life
of LSR, which was much more complicated and harder to understand than
Gnopernicus, although for some things it actually did work better.
And then along came Orca. It blew everything else out of the water, and
allowed me to do online banking, paying the bills and everything, all
using Firefox, as the text browsers never could go on bank sites and
even allow me to login on my bank's website, even for the purposes of
just checking my balance, let alone paying the bills. Firefox opened up
another whole new world, as using it to do that one thing I wasn't able
to do in the text consoles of Linux allowed me to finally rid myself
entirely of the monstrosity that was Windows XP.
As time went on, I learned more and more of the graphical desktop in
addition to the things I learned of various distributions, from Fedora
to Debian to Ubuntu and eventually Arch, and with each version of
GNOME+Orca and each distribution, the entire experience improved. All
the time, I wanted other people to experience what I was experiencing,
but I didn't feel that dropping them into a shell and saying "here's
your new system, have fun," was a good idea. So I learned the graphical
way and found more and more ways of doing things that didn't necessarily
require dropping someone into a shell and telling them to type in some
cryptic set of commands. To this day, I still keep a terminal open, as
the best thing in the whole world about Linux is the fact that the OS
and available applications keep adding more and more choices, taking
absolutely nothing away, not even that good old GNOME 2.x interface I
came to love so much. They just call it MATE now, but they certainly
didn't take it away; they just made it even better. And this is how I
learned how to use graphical desktops, all the time keeping my knowledge
of the basic command and filesystem structures. I do believe Arch was
the key that unlocked the entire world of computing to me, and that's
why I still love and use it to this day, even though I will not hesitate
to recommend something even more graphical such as Fedora or OpenSUSE to
my clients, as I want to help them get up and running, not overwhelm
them with ls, cp, mv and endless manpages and wiki documents. Hope this
helps, maybe a little.
Sent from the ladder
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