Originally Posted by Big Phat Jan

I think it's undeniable that someone with a working knowledge of the command line can get things done much more quickly than someone without, ... The time you're talking about wasting is really negligible (imho).

At the most a couple of days of actual use to get the basics. It'll pay you back in spades when you want to rename hundreds of files in a photo album (for example).

Originally Posted by krisse

This isn't a system administrators' convention here, we're talking about a consumer product aimed at ordinary people who aren't hobbyists.

They do not want to learn text-based commands entered at a prompt. It doesn't matter how much benefit they get from it, it is simply not something they would do.

They don't give a rat's arse about Maemo itself, they just want a cool gadget that does fun things and is easy to use. Command lines aren't cool, they're not fun, and they're not easy to use.

Originally Posted by MrGrim

As can be expected, there has been a jump in the number of questions asked lately. Many were newbies asking various questions from the answerable-by-google kinds to the the inadvertently-expert type. And i have seen lots of "don't" advice posted in those threads.
Now, while i understand why it's bad to install apps from unsafe repos like extras-devel or go red-pill if you're not in the know, the danger of other things (like simply giving some commands in the terminal) is quite exaggerated. Many simply say "don't use the terminal if you're a noob". And i think they're pretty wrong.
I remember my first steps into linux. Gosh was i shaky. I had some experience with the awful windows command prompt, but everything was different under linux, so i wasn't very eager to use it. But i gradually got used to it. And most importantly, i understood that it's hard to do serious damage using just terminal commands. After the first time i killed my os (i think by changing something in the X configuration) and managed to reinstall everything the way it was quite easily, i was even more convinced.
Now think about them newbs. Maemo 5 is admittedly not perfectly user-friendly yet. Which means that you might not get full functionality if you don't get a little down-and-dirty. But the newbs are told not to do that, for fear of somehow doing some damage. What's even stranger is that sometimes they want to use something relatively harmless. And remember it's hard to do serious damage to linux without being root.
So my proposal is: let's give newbs some credit for being reasonably capable. Don't tell them off using terminal just because they don't have experience - they aren't going to get any either by not doing anything. Just warn when possibly damaging commands are involved (like rm - but don't go overboard, cat or grep can hardly be dangerous). And if something dangerous is involved, instead of recommending not to do it, warn about the danger and advise people to be ready to reflash if anything goes wrong - leaving them the choice of whether to do it or not
Sorry for the long text, hope you had the patience to read it

Originally Posted by qole

ARJWright's comments reminded me that I am finding fewer and fewer reasons to go "back" to Windows. The easy addition of support for Nikon's raw photo format into Ubuntu has impressed the pants off of me. I actually had to boot into Linux to edit my raw photos!

Originally Posted by DaveP1

I don't ever want to have to use the terminal. The whole point of a GUI is to get away from having to type everything. With a well written GUI, once it is installed, you should be able to do anything without going to whatever terminal is called in whatever OS you are using.