> Indeed, my goal when setting up Linux for end users is to try and make > sure they never even see a command line. Musicians aren't geeks [...] mmm... let me see... john chowning? charles dodge? paul lansky? james dashow? i could go on and on, and please note that i've been kind enough not to even mention iannis xenakis. i consider myself a musician. i studied composition more than seven years at the university in my home town. everything very traditional, generous amounts of harmony, counterpoint, fugue and orchestration. i'm not a programmer and never studied anything related to computer sciences. i guess i'm not a "geek", although i'm not completely sure what the term means exactly. i just taught myself enough to be able to use a command line, to build my own binaries from sources, and edit my configuration files by hand using vim. and that i prefer to installing precompiled rpms and using graphical tools for configuration. just my personal preference. i use linuxfromscratch and very happy with it. do not understand me wrong, i know perfectly well that many users, musicians or not, prefer a different approach, and that distributions like redhat and mandrake have done a lot to make linux more accessible to many users. i have recommended redhat and planet ccrma to many of my students. i'm reacting now because i'm just fed up with those generalizations saying that "musicians" don't want to see a command line, "musicians" don't want to compile, "musicians" want to have everything hidden, "musicians" don't want to program, "musicians" don't want to learn anything new or different, "musicians" are lazy, "musicians" are stupid.... there are many different kinds of musicians, you know. some of them got their hands dirty programming. thanks to them, to people like chowning or dodge, who are indeed great musicians, we have many of the tools available today. please excuse if i overreacted, i sincerely didn't mean to offend anyone. it's just that i'm being a bit offended myself by all those assumptions about musicians in general, that imply i'm not one of them. best, lj
