Ramblings and questions regarding Fedora, but stemming from gnome-software and desktop environments

[Andrew Lutomirski]

On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 10:36 AM, Miloslav Trmač <mitr at redhat.com> wrote:
>> While I think you are right in some cases like cashier, isn't this
>> discussion really about the Fedora Workstation?! Since for this the
>> target user is a developer, can we just agree that in this case the user
>> needs both CLI and GUI apps (although some developers certainly sticks
>> to one of them).
>
> The gist is that
> * Nobody _should_ need to use a terminal: non-developers¹ don’t need it, and developers deserve a better environment.  It’s “only” a matter of writing lots of new software.  AFAICT Workstation would in some ideal future want to get to this state.  (And non-Linux operating systems are getting closer and closer to this ideal over time.)

Having watched people develop under Mac OS X, they have really shiny
things to play with.  Xcode is pretty, and there are whole pile of
nice editors and such to use.  Heck, even Firefox and Chromium are
gradually turning into developer tools as opposed to just being
browsers and debuggers.

Nonetheless, the productive Mac OS X developers I know all have
something like an entire desktop devoted to just running terminals.

Given that no one, on any OS I've ever seen*, has come up with
something better than a terminal for running scripts, watching log
messages scroll by, using fancy shell commands, etc., I think that
expecting Fedora to magically solve all these problems is both overly
optimistic and is an entirely inappropriate assumption to base the OS
design on.

* The terminal on Windows is, or at least was, awful.  That just meant
that productivity went down, not that the GUI tools were in any
respect better.

--Andy

>
> * _Currently_ most Linux developers do need to use a terminal.
>
> So there is no right answer, only a trade-off: Make terminal usage discouraged and difficult for current users, and hopefully get better non-terminal environment in the future, or make terminal usage easy and the generally recommended way, and give up hope on the developer UI significantly improving for the future users.
>     Mirek
>
> ¹ Again considering shell scripts and pipelines as “development”.
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