Discussion
the thing i want, the thing i have always wanted, for any new computer experience, is: a menu bar
i am sorry to say that my first independent exploration of a computer at age six was neither command line or gui, but ms-dos shell
in addition to the hierarchical filesystem view, it had a predefined hierarchy of actions in a menu bar
a tidy list of (ostensibly) everything you can make your computer do, organized into categories and subcategories
yes!!!
(except the "we" part; i never wanted my menu bars discarded, dipshits at microsoft initiated that with the "ribbon" bullshit; leading into the whole rant about computer malfeasance misattributed to "us" or "programmers" versus "our bosses" or "the industry" or "perverse incentives of capitalism")
(but none of that is for you, you get it) ☺️
maybe this desire is dismissable because it's just my own familiarity and encountering it at a formative age
but i bet it's not
i bet there's something special about being handed a menu that makes utterly unfamiliar environments instantly welcoming
why have i stuck to debian for so long? the democratic process? the lack of b.s.? both nice, but no. aptitude is why. a tui shell for its package manager (apt) with a nice arrow-keys scrollable list of packages, and: a menu bar!
ms-dos shell was just one of several ancient programs that could do a welcoming-looking menu bar in an entirely textmode user interface
learning how to make netbsd or any other unfamiliar system go by rtfm and commands is not beyond my ability
but i feel like a little tui visualization of the system's general state with a menubar of operations would be a powerful accelerant to onboarding newbies
and doing it in textmode would be vastly easier than a gui for the same
maybe i could make this
@pho4cexa the first couple of places i had a unix shell in the 90s, a default login would give you a TUI menu rather than dropping you straight into the command line. it had mail, chat, news, an exit to csh or whatever it was back then - all the stuff a typical user would want. i think it's kind of been forgotten, but when these were systems exposed to end-users as a primary interface, this kind of scaffolding was pretty common.
Install Fedizen
Get the full app experience
@pho4cexa menu systems are near the top of the list of computer discoveries of the 70s-90s that we're total dipshits for discarding as a culture.
(elsewhere on the list: scrollbars, file managers, desktop mail clients, screensavers with fish...)