Poll

Yes, I know that sounds like BS from a bygone day, but as a mostly-Windows geek, every time I dive deeper into Linux, on desktop or server, I'm struck by the eventual need to go to the command line / terminal.

That's okay, for me -- I LIKE the command line and spend a fair amount of time there in Windows -- but reports to the contrary I don't see a way for a moderately technical user to avoid it under Linux. Far too many things are still VERY much dependent upon it, from daemons to drivers to fixes to patches to scheduling to startup etc. When something really goes wrong, you know the answer will not lie anywhere in the realm of the available GUI.

Sure, theoretically a user can steer apt-get or yum shells via a GUI, and can open up config files when necessary in a GUI editor, but who are we kidding? There's just no way you can live entirely in the GUI in Linux as you can in Windows, for technical or (to a lesser degree) non-technical users.

On the server side of course it's FAR worse. Using something like WebMin one inevitably ends up resorting to the command line fairly often.

Sure, every OS is just a thin veneer over what's going on underneath, and GUIs more so, but that surface is still too thin and shatterable in Linux distributions and desktops. My favorite desktop is KDE, and many distros shun it!