On 01/02/2015 08:48 AM, Richard Hughes wrote:
Okay, lets do a thought experiment. Is a console application anything that exists in /usr/bin? If not, what additional rules are required for a "sane" set? Are all files in /usr/bin "applications"?

Actually, yes, I believe that every one of them serves a purpose, and was important enough for someone to sit down and write the code to do it.

Richard, I do appreciate what you're trying to do---part of Unix' 'newbie-unfriendly' reputation is the 'black window' mentality and lack of regard for aesthetics (viz. Linus' recent hilarious rant about "emo terminals" https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/Wh3qTjMMbLC ).  I agree that Linux has to get better in this respect, because it makes it a better environment, and helps it compete with Android/MacOS/Windows.

Still there is a ton of things that are trivial with CLI and surprisingly hard without it. Not all of them are geeky or developy: just the other day, I was looking at an SD card from my camera; the JPEGS were in a standard DCIM directory, but the video files were hidden under multiple levels of non-obviously-named directories. Finding them on Windows was quite frustrating, whereas on Linux it was simply "find . -size +99999"

The executive summary: I hope there's a way to improve the pretty graphical interfaces without relegating the CLI to some second-class status.