On 10/8/07, cragos@gmail.com <cragos@gmail.com> wrote:
These two are related in the *NIX mentality that incubated the development of the BSDs and Linux:
8: Tendencies towards standards compliance and openness in the FOSS
community make it far more likely that related projects will be able
to effectively and efficiently interact.
10: (More a plus for *NIX than FOSS) Having more mature command line
interfaces than are available in pre-Win2k7 builds of Windows Server
substantially cut the amount of time needed to populate changes across
multiple servers.
The Windows people have completely adopted the "GUI=User Friendly, CLI=Unfriendly" meme to the point where they don't recognize the power of the CLI and text files, which are at the heart of the Tao of Unix. I routinely compose "recipes" of Bourne shell commands that expedite configuring a *nix server in a certain way, and share them with my co-workers. With those recipes, they can quickly apply a fix to establish a consistent state on the target machine. Explaining how to do the same thing in a GUI can take several pages.
Given a system that can be configured entirely with text files and command lines, we can build "friendly" GUIs for the newbs, but it's not always so easy to go the other direction.
Just for an example, whenever I boot my laptop into Windows, the sound settings are not what I left them at when Windows last shut down. Every freaking time I have to open up the Control Panel Sounds and Audio applet, click on Advanced in the Device volume section, and re-adjust the sliders to what I want. This is going backwards. My very first sound card when I ran DOS had a command I could include in
AUTOEXEC.BAT to set the card up the way I wanted, and I could also put commands in the batch files that launched various apps to reconfigure the thing to my preferences for that app.
The entire point of a computer is to automate repetitive tasks. "Point and grunt" is hardly as sophisticated as actual words.