Some points in the defense of bash commands: 1) they apply equally to all the different *buntus. If you give GUI-based instructions for Gnome, they probably won’t apply at all to KDE or Xfce; 2) while it is possible to do most things through GUIs in modern Ubuntu, it often takes much, much longer to accomplish a certain task than it would in the terminal, and GUI instructions are often a lot vaguer, especially without screenshots (and you need a lot of time on your hands if you want to make screenshots); 3) GUIs change substantially with each new Ubuntu release, meaning that instructions given for Ubuntu 8.04 are not guaranteed to work in 8.10 or 7.10. The command-line interface rarely changes, and instructions written for it are likely to remain valid for a long time; 4) the terminal almost always gives more useful and meaningful feedback in the case of errors, while GUIs more often than not fail silently (which is maybe something developers should pay more attention to), leaving users confused and the people trying to help them with little to go on.

Your points regarding bash commands are also valid, but I’m still inclined to think that they’re the best way to go in most cases.

1. The main PROBLEM with Ubuntu Forums is all the people giving advice in the form of bash scripts and commands. This is emphatically NOT a good thing. Ubuntu is meant to be usable without ever going to the command line. For at least 98% of computer users, Linux’s reliance on the command line is the major reason to ignore it and buy Windows or OS X. Ubuntu’s finally starting to overcome this, and we should be helping with that, not dragging it back down.

When people resort to giving advice in the form of bash commands because they’re too lazy to write out detailed GUI instructions, they intimidate people who might have otherwise used Ubuntu and encourage poor security practices. Yes, the command line is “powerful”. That’s exactly why you shouldn’t be using it to instruct newbies. The command line is a tool for programmers, not a user interface. It only takes a 1 character mistake to destroy your entire life’s work. Encouraging users to copy and paste cryptic commands that they don’t understand is awful from a security and social engineering standpoint.

Often the commands are outdated or non-applicable anyway. Careless Ubuntu Forums members copy and paste the commands they’ve been using in other distros for the past 10 years without realizing that there are better ways to do things in Ubuntu (telling users to dist-upgrade, for instance, when they should be using update-manager).

Avoid bash commands whenever possible. If there’s a graphical way to do it, tell the user how to do it that way. Even better, link to something that’s already been written. The user will learn the proper way to interact with the computer instead of just mindlessly copying and pasting commands they don’t understand and that may or may not screw up their system in ways they won’t know how to fix.

2. Telling the user to “become root” with those words linked to a web page that describes what this means (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RootSudo) is a much better idea than giving them a specific bash command. How many people unwittingly equate “become root” with “sudo” and then misuse it to start graphical programs instead of using gksudo?

On the Ubuntu wiki, for instance, you’re never supposed to say “sudo apt-get install”. You’re supposed to say “use any method to install package x” and make a link to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallingSoftware, where the different methods of installing packages are described.

We should be using apt: URLs to install packages and linking to well-written graphical instructions for everything else, not copying and pasting bash commands.

4. Linking to a solution (like importing libraries while coding) is much better than copying and pasting it. If there’s a problem with the solution, it can be fixed in one central place instead of leaving misleadingly incorrect copies all over the web. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_repeat_yourself

If a solution is not complete enough, it can be expanded. If an update makes the solution invalid, it can be updated once and all “references” to that advice will be up to date, too. It will also increase the likelihood that future users can find the solution directly when they search for it instead of having to ask.

If the solution isn’t written up anywhere, type it up on Ubuntu Wiki and link to it. You’ll only have to type it once, and can then reuse it over and over just by pasting a link. If it’s not quite applicable to a certain question, you can add a little to the wiki page instead of retyping and modifying the whole thing. When you link to the wiki, other people can edit it to keep the information up-to-date, too, taking even more burden off of you.

Posting scripts and half-baked hacks on the Forums as workarounds for problems is ok, but we should really be working to fix the underlying problems for all users instead.

With desktop support starting at $250, who *would* pay for it? I know I’d definitely pay for support if it were priced differently. If I could pay $10 per user-level question and I knew I could get an authoritative answer quickly from Canonical, I’d often do that instead of Ubuntu Forums.

People should always remember those users looking for support aren’t looking for a computer science lecture.

In my mind, people are already cutting and pasting blindly based on trust so the situation isn’t really any different. Just say “Click on the following link to install the Adobe Flash plug-in automatically” and you should be safe. Ubuntu users can already install a DEB off of the Internet using GDebi-GTK directly from FF, and that’s the default behavior. There’s also “Download and double click.” The Windows world came to Ubuntu several years ago. http://slashdot.org/~Daengbo/journal/144751

I used to use apt: links when they came out because I was supporting beginners on Ubuntu, but I’m not doing as much beginner work anymore and I’ve tried to expand to the whole Debian family. I still use apt: for my Linux games site when that is possible.

The Ubuntu proposal (put on hold for several releases) to have a one-click repo addition seems VERY dangerous, however.

Daeng: the apt links are a really clever idea, and one that I hadn’t considered–I’ve actually only ever seen a handful of sites that offer them. On the other hand, I’d worry about the security implications of getting users used to clicking ‘OK’ whenever something pops up in the browser wanting to install software. You get the gksudo prompt, of course, but too many people would just enter a password without thinking. Isn’t that where Windows and IE went wrong?

Perhaps I just got unlucky, but the one time I ever called Microsoft’s support (Outlook Express quits on startup, and they had a support contract so it didn’t cost the usual $55 per call) they referred me to a number of articles in MSKB all of which which I already found through google. Those articles involved editing registry keys which seemed to me far more cryptic than anything I have ever encountered in the Linux world.

I got slightly more help from a #windows channel on IRC (they explained better that Microsoft what they thought the problem was, how editing certain files and registry keys might fix it, and came up with a few new things to try) but after more than two hours, reinstalling Windows did seem to be the only thing that would fix the problem.