I learned Unix way before I touched any of its gui's. The flavor of
unix my employer had was bsd and it had the learn utility operational.
I was able to go through many of those lessons and read man pages and
then got into a unix class. Later me and some other members of the
penguin users group took about a year to figure it all out but I finally
got Redhat 5.0 installed and talking. From there I tried out Slackware
(no longer a viable accessibility alternative) and then moved along to
debian. I got help with the last two installations and the idea it
would be possible by listening to some of those main menu programs on
acbradio. I did a little bit with orca while employed at home but have
had more time for it now I'm retired. I also got into archlinux while
employed and still use that flavor of linux allbeit on a separate hard
drive.
On Mon, 18 Jul 2016, Kyle wrote:
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2016 20:02:20
From: Kyle <kyle4jesus@xxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: Linux for blind general discussion <blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: How did people here learn GUIs
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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