It's often the quickest, simplest way to fix most problems when you don't have physical access to the machine. It's often easier to say "open a terminal, and paste this in", rather than a multi-page list of instructions on how to find the option in the GUI which quite often won't apply if the user has changed any settings. The only way to make GUI instructions clearer is by taking lots of screenshots, which people on forums generally can't be bothered to do.BoneyCork wrote:but even I cringe everytime I get told to "open a terminal...".
Same goes for Mac OS X - it's often much quicker to explain how to do something from the command line than through the UI. If you look at the advice given out on forums with lots of geeks, it tends to use the command line. On forums with fewer geeks, it tends to be GUI-based instructions, and about ten times as long. Obviously most places people might ask for Linux advice tend to be full of geeks.
The same would be true on Windows as well, except you can't actually do much from the Windows CLI. Still, I see people posting advice to Windows users telling them to use the command prompt for diagnosing or fixing a problem, especially problems with networking or file permissions.
Anyway, have you ever tried explaining to someone how to add a network connection (VPN, modem, broadband, or whatever) in Windows XP? It's almost impossible to explain to normal people without resorting to screenshots. There are just so many ways to get to the damned thing, and there's no single way that always works.
Now try writing a manual explaining not only that, but also how to use Remote Desktop, and how to use the various admin tools on Windows Server 2003 to do things like add and remove users. You quickly end up with a twenty page document, which took hours to write. The same management tasks from a command line (written for a different audience, admittedly) barely take up two pages of instructions.
On that note... all operating systems suck. Which is a shame. I use Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux (Ubuntu, usually) on a daily basis, and all of them get really irritating. I'd kind of like to use an OS that I can actually get some work done on it, without either fighting it, or having bits of it blow up on me for no apparent reason.