this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
160 points (90.8% liked)

Linux

48031 readers
1156 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] bitfucker@programming.dev 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

And how does the user suppose to know to type man? He may remember the instructions to check man, but he may not. For us, those 3 letter words are very familiar, but others need time to remember them. On GUI, this is no problem because as I stated they will bound to find it by exploring. Basically point and click adventure games I guess rather than the guessing game. And users will choose the path they most familiar first.

[–] Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Bigger problem, even if they know about MAN pages, remembering what their looking for is hard. You can't type 'man dnf' if you don't remember what your package manager is called.

I wonder how feasible searching MAN pages is.

[–] bitfucker@programming.dev 2 points 5 months ago

Yeah good point. Navigation can be unintuitive too. Like, how do you quit? Is it q? Ctrl+C? What even is the weird symbol before C? Those are some of the hurdles that must be overcome when coming to CLI and not necessarily easy to remember. Sure you can do it in 1 hour, but say tomorrow would you remember it again? What if the system is running smoothly for 1 month and you never opened the terminal again after those 1 hour?

[–] erwan@lemmy.ml -1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

You don't need man, just type the command with no arguments and you'll get the help message.

[–] bitfucker@programming.dev 4 points 5 months ago

Alright, try it with cat