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by Defletter 509 days ago
Except for most ordinary use cases. I guarantee you that, if someone downloads a compressed file, they'll find it infinitely easier to right click and select the "Extract here" option than whipping out some tar command. The linux-brain has people convinced that the layman would prefer the latter if only they would listen.
1 comments
megous 509 days ago
That's some windows-land programming right there. The idea that a file is something clickable, some icon with a title somewhere on the screen.

And typing 5 letters is clearly not infinitely harder than right-click and rummaging through 20 item menu to find the right action. The difference is actually infinitesimally small.

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Defletter 509 days ago
I'll hold your hand while I offer this groundbreaking revelation: the vast, vast majority of people are in Windows-land. We're even having issues with the younger generations who do everything on their phone and this don't really have any concept of file systems. Get out of your echo chamber. That means getting off of HN and start looking at how laymen use computers.
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megous 504 days ago
My echo chamber is Norton Commander or M602 on MS-DOS, thats how I grew up to understand what a files are and how to work with them. That's how laymen used computers back then and what was thought in schools.

Key property of these was that they had command line, so you could easily navigate and execute arbitrary commands on what you see, by typing them in.

The major reason people don't use command line interface on windows or smartphones and other appliances, is because it does not have anything remotely comparable pre-installed, so they're forced to use the inferior interface.

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Defletter 501 days ago
Apologies but you simply have not grasped the sheer difference in scale between now and then: the number of people who are reasonably competent with a terminal nowadays would absolutely dwarf the total number of people who owned computers then... and the former are an undeniably tiny minority in the total number of people who own computers now. You really, really need to get out of your bubble.

> The major reason people don't use command line interface on windows or smartphones and other appliances, is because it does not have anything remotely comparable pre-installed, so they're forced to use the inferior interface.

If you say so, but you'll have to forgive me if I don't hold my breath waiting for the CLI-smartphone revolution.

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