they don’t want to mess with the terminal to troubleshoot any errors.

I reject your premise that the purpose of the terminal is to troubleshoot errors. That is part of the widespread misconception I am talking about.

The terminal is simply for using the computer. With all the command line utilities available, and their widespread interoperability, the terminal should be one of the first tools a user looks for.

A GUI is a hammer. The CLI is the Snap-On tool truck.

EVERYTHING? I enjoy doing things that aren’t eating and sex on a intrinsic level that I was never trained to enjoy.

No, not “intrinsically”, you don’t. Food, fuck, sleep, that’s about it. You likely enjoy other things as well, but not intrinsically. I enjoy Sudoku, but that is something I learned. There is no “enjoy sudoko” element within me that I did not put there myself.

Why didn’t people adopt personal computers en masse before Windows came to be then?

They did. Everyone I knew back in the Windows 3.1 days already had computers. Most of those people didn’t have Windows, and used standalone applications. The increase in ownership came when hardware prices finally fell enough for them to be affordable. Windows development was a result of that uptick, not the cause.

No worries!

Shut up, wesley

Do you also think that anyone that wants a car should be a mechanic?

I reject the premise.

I think that anyone who wants to be a driver should be able to understand that the brake pedal squeezes the pads against the rotor.

I don’t think that everyone who can identify a brake rotor is a mechanic.

Anyone that wants a drug should be a pharmacist?

I think that anyone who wants any sort of medicine should have enough medical, mathematical, and statistical knowledge to understand that vaccines don’t cause autism. I don’t think that everyone with such knowledge is a pharmacist, mathematician, or statistician.

The idea that the command line is “unfriendly” and that decelopers should hide it away is, in my opinion, the computer equivalent of the antivax movement.

Most people do not intrinsically desire that.

The only things that people “intrinsically” want are food and fornication. Everything else, they have been taught and trained. The training they have received from Microsoft domination has been “don’t learn how to use a computer”.

That training is something to despise and reject, not incorporate into Linux.

Most people don’t care about automation. They just don’t.

Microsoft would certainly have us believe that. Decades of operant conditioning by Microsoft and Apple have given us that attitude.

Most people certainly do want automation; they don’t know how to automate. There was a meme floating around recently about a temp who replaced hours and hours of tedious, daily transcription between two applications with ctrl-c, ctrl-v.

We have all seen plenty of examples like this, with users doing excessive manual labor out of simple ignorance of absurdly simple automation.

And your still refusing the point.

The point arises from the very attitude I am challenging, so yes, I am refusing the point. We should not be encouraging or supporting the behaviors you describe, but should instead be promoting the tools that allow the average user to identify menial tasks and relegate them to the machine.

In my opinion, Linux and its various distro’s main goal ought to be to undermine for-profit OS. Not to turn everyone into computer techs.

Turning everyone into “computer techs” is how we undermine for-profit OS. The command line is a spoon. In the hand of a toddler, it goes flying across the room, along with the mashed potatoes it held. Microsoft’s answer to that flying spoon is to teach the kid that they can never touch the spoon; they must let mommy do it for them (and here is “mommy’s” bill for that “service”).

Microsoft teaches that it is a “pipe dream” for the average person to ever have sufficient mastery over the spoon to be able to feed themselves. They taught us that spoons are scary and dangerous.

Linux keeps putting that spoon on her tray, and encouraging her to use it.

My “goal” has less to do with bringing Linux to the masses and more with bringing the masses to Linux. The “pipe dream” argument you presented should not be ported in. The “normie” should be taught from a very young age that the command line isn’t “unfriendly”, but wildly powerful, and well within their capacity to wield.

if my whole family is to use a Linux environement thet moment they will see a consol they will run away.

Then they will never script anything. They will never automate a task themselves. They will only ever operate a computer manually, interactively, rather than programmatically.

Windows pushed users to remain toddlers their entire lives. They charge us for the privilege, so they want to keep spoon feeding us for our entire lives. When we see a spoon anywhere but in their hands, they want us to throw it across the room rather than pick it up and try to use it.

Microsoft wants your family to run away screaming, rather than asking what that console is and what it can do.

The objective of Linux is to put the spoon on the tray of your toddler’s high chair. Linux encourages her to pick it up, poke it at her food, and keep encouraging her to learn, to develop and build on her skills, until she is asking for the fork, the knife.

Dude, nobody wants to take away the CLI on Linux

…

If we want Linux to succeed, there needs to be at least one distro that confidently ships without a terminal.

Yep. Every Linux problem has the exact same solution: ctrl-c, ctrl-v.

The user is never be expected to type a command into a terminal.

Nope! Absolutely not. This is where Windows 95 fucked us all over. Prior to 95, windows was an application executed from a DOS prompt. Users may not have known many commands, but they learned that commands could be given.

Windows 95 tried to convince us that a GUI developer knew better than the user everything the user wanted to be able to do with that computer. It did make simple use easier, but the way it did it was by hiding the average user away from any simple ability to automate. It took away virtually all command line utilities that could be scripted to run themselves, and replaced them with GUI-driven applications that required the human’s time and attention, repeatedly and monotonously sorting through graphical menus and prompts to achieve a task that the computer could easily be “trained” to do itself. It did it by dumbing down the user, reducing their expectations to the few idea the GUI allowed them to express.

GUIs are Fisher-Price toys. They are the bright and shiny, but functionally crippled. There is no need for a distro that deliberately impairs the user in the way that you describe.

Cheaper? They don’t care about cheaper. That custom control interface is a revenue stream.

Certainly. I agree completely.

The correspondent’s dinner isn’t the proper venue for that.

The correspondent’s dinner is, in part, a comedy roast of the president and his administration. The guests are overtly praising and honoring the roasted. They are laughing with the guest of honor, not at him.

We should absolutely ridicule Trump, Musk, and the rest, mercilessly. But none of them deserve the honor of a roast.

Based on his rhetoric toward Greenland and Canada, I think he definitely wants to annex something. A cartel-governed central/south american country makes a pretty tempting target for imperial conquest.

Who sees what is happening in the white house and wants to crack jokes?

For the next four years, the Correspondent’s Dinner should be a wake, and not an Irish one.

Can’t. You have to be qualified to run for president in order to run as VP. He isn’t eligible to run again.

You can serve out less than two years of another president’s term, and still be eligible to be elected to two terms of your own. For example, Harris could have replaced Biden two years into his term, in which case she probably would have won in 2024, and remained eligible to run in 2028. You can be president up to (but not including) 10 years.

If he tries to do something unconstitutional, he won’t be on the ballot in many states

Of course. I was considering a worst-case scenario in which elections were somehow suspended in 2028, so that the states could not elect a different president.

Of course I know that. I can’t control whether Trump follows the constitution. I can’t control whether you follow the constitution. I can only control my own actions. And as of 20 January 2029, Trump is no longer president.

If you’re going to claim otherwise, you do so at your own peril.