[Sussex] A rant on using different distributions

[Mark Harrison (Groups)]

On Tue, 2005-09-27 at 14:34 +0100, Steve Dobson wrote:
> Now come on.  You can't be saying that learning one command which has
> numerous flags to change what it does is easier to remember than a 
> different command for each one.


I think that I could argue that very point.

The naming of commands is an optimisation problem :-)

I am a "daily Linux user" - I am writing to you from my Ubuntu machine,
which I use for groups mail, web access, and OpenOffice - so about 70%
of my PC usage.

I am an "infrequent Linux admin" - I set up boxes for myself
infrequently, and manage people who set them up for clients, but I would
not consider myself a technical guru in any way about admin stuff.

When I want to do a particular task, the biggest problem is NOT working
out which flags I need to use. It's working out which COMMAND I need to
use. Once I've worked that out, I can follow MAN pages / HOWTOs with the
best of them.

Remembering a single command name is a lot easier than remembering that
there are multiple commands with similar names, and the first bit of the
man page checking is working out which is appropriate.

Ironically, this is an area where gentoo seems optimised for the
infrequent admin :-)

Mark