Dumbing Down the User
Did you know that the shell of a GNU/Linux system is only useful for system administrators and developers? Neither did I. Too bad we’re all wrong. But maybe I should begin at the beginning.
A friend of mine recently came to me and asked me why the “New Terminal” entry in the right-click menu of GNOME wasn’t there anymore, and how he could get it back. I didn’t know and started looking for an answer on the web, being no GNOME user myself.
Well, I found it. In a mail to the fedora-devel list, Colin Walters explained that GNOME is cleaning up the core desktop, removing things “that are only useful for”—brace yourself—“developers and system administrators.”
Now maybe I should mention that that friend of mine is far from being either one. I installed Ubuntu on his box, and he enjoys it a lot, asking me questions on how to do this and that, but generally getting along quite well. He prefers Ubuntu over Windows any day except for games. And he uses the shell for quite a few things.
The command line is a powerful interface to the computer, and surely not only useful to “developers and system administrators.” In arguing that the “average user” will not want to use it, GNOME is dumbing down its users, making them more stupid than they are.
If they had removed that menu stating that they wanted to generally clean up the environment, making the right-click menu as small as possible—well, sure, go ahead. But that the command line is only useful to “developers and system administrators” is the dumbest thing I’ve heard in a long time, if you indulge me the insult. If the GNOME people think of their users as that stupid, they better beware not to suffer from the Pygmalion effect. Good luck, GNOME.
PS. Dear users, if you want your terminal back, install the nautilus-open-terminal or gnome-open-terminal package.
