Thanks for the Virus.

[John Culleton]

On Tuesday 17 March 2009 12:56:30 pm Jonathan Byrne wrote:
> On 3/17/2009, "Dotan Cohen" <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> The easiest way to see all running processes in
> >> Intrepid (i think Steven running that) is to press
> >> CTRL-ESC.
> >
> >That is being disabled in Kubuntu 9.04. Apparently, this
> > is to prevent users from accidentally hitting the key
> > combination.
>
> Am I the only one who thinks that's nuts? In 10 years of
> using Linux, I've never accidentally hit ctrl-esc. OK,
> I've never used it, either, preferring to do that stuff
> from the command line, but being able to do those things
> quickly and easily with ctrl-esc is probably really
> useful for a number of people.
>
> I'd hate to see Kubuntu go down the GNOME road and become
> Linux with training wheels. I moved from Debian to Ubuntu
> in 2003 when it was still in beta and there was not yet a
> separate Kubuntu and KDE on Ubuntu was still a bit rough
> and have really enjoyed it, but those are the kinds of
> things that could push a person back to mainline Debian.
>
> If anyone with the ability to reverse that bad idea is
> reading this, please think about doing so.
>
> Best,
>
> Jonathan


Well you just told this kid not to put a bean  up his nose. 
I tried it and got an interesting display on my Slack 12.2 
and KDE 3.5 system, comparable in some ways to top.  but 
nothing blew up, the sky did not fall.  

I recognize that Ubuntu/Kubuntu are mommyfied versions of 
Debian which in turn is hardly my favorite version of 
Linux. But Kubuntu serves some purposes on this workstation 
as previously mentioned. I would of course agree with you 
that the CLI is an enhancement and not an evil thing, and 
is no more complicated to use than typing in an email. 

Some four decades ago I wrote to the originators of BASIC up 
at Dartmouth College asking for some enhancements for 
business use. They protested that BASIC was only a 
simplified alternative to FORTRAN etc. for use by students 
to learn the basics of programming in an easy interactive 
fashion. However BASIC grew bigger than its original 
purpose despite cries of protest from its creators. 

Similarly Ubuntu/Kubuntu for some of us has outgrown its 
original purpose of being a Kindergarten version of Debian. 
The newbie should of course not be shouldered out of the 
conversation, but room needs to be left for the old-timer 
like me who finds some utility in Kubuntu in my work. 

Also, even newbies grow out of kindergarten eventually. 
There should be a path of learning left open to the more 
universal language of Linux, which is a clear superset of 
the language of Unix, which is (gasp) the CLI.  

I may be confused a bit with KDE 4.x with its plasmas and 
all. But on the CLI I am back to familiar concepts and 
commands, on any *nix based OS.  It would be patronizing 
indeed for  me to assume that the CLI is a secret black art 
to be used only by the cognoscenti. It is a tool that 
ultimately should be in everyone's toolkit.
-- 
John Culleton
Able Indexers and Typesetters
http://wexfordpress.com