Teaching them to do searches is perhaps the most important and useful thing they need to know. But the search engines are so corrupted with spam , it can be very difficult to find the good tutorials, there are many that come up in a search, but the page is so cluttered with adds, you can not hardly read the tutorial, but if you can read it, you see that it is just bits and pieces that were copy pasted into the page, but now I guess that is another topic,...
The basic commands are important or used to be, now a days when we try to explain and show even a basic command, EG:
This is how to see what is in a directory:
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$ ls
we get a response,
"Oh no, isn't there a GUI for that "... sheesh,...ok well I guess there is, install a file manager, and use it,..."But how do I install a file manager ?",
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# apt install thunar
"Of no, but I can not use a CLI, How do I do that with the GUI ? ", "what GUI do you have ? " (type the name of it in the terminal and hit enter) "Oh no, I can't find the terminal , and don't use the CLI, I am using Gnome , I need the GUI, and so on,..
We then have to explain how to install something using synaptic package manager, or do a search for them and find one of the many tutorials that explain the details of installing packages, including a file manager, or we need to give them screen shots of which menu item to click, etc,... I enjoy helping new users, but sometimes it does get frustrating,......Sometimes it is fun and hilarious, though...any way, I think if and when one has the time ,screen shots, and even screen videos, are great tools for helping them. Oh and by the way:
Just to clarify: Even the most "unfriendly" distributions, like Debian (joking),
The most Unfriendly OS is MS windows, at least to me, but the last time I looked at it , Gnome was doing a good job at getting unfreindly, I really could not find the terminal, and needed it to start a editor,...I finally found it burried in a menu, behind a icon that I was not yet familiar with,...In a library , and I did not have my laptop with me, so I needed to use their computer, it was MS windows,...don't remember off hand which version,...any way, I could not figure out how to print some documents I had downloaded, same problem as Gnome, "Where is the terminal ?" Librarian says "I don't know what you mean,", me :" You know, for the commands, to start the printer", she says "No, it does not have that, I will show you,..", we go to computer, and she moves the mouse around and a menu pops up, it has a option that says "PRINT", she then asks me to show her which files were mine, and quickly printed them,...Windows is the most user unfriendly thing ever created, but the people that are used to it , think it is user friendly, .....
