Linux is a derivative of Unix, and Unix was developed by programmers for programmers.
The cherished dream of Linux zealots is that they’re going to displace Microsoft (and for some of them, Apple as well) from the desktop. It won’t happen, because of your experience.
Here’s the brutal truth: Unix systems are about as friendly and forgiving as a bucketful of badgers.
I’ve used Unix systems since the mid-80’s, so I’m well used to the crap that Unix dishes out. I also use Unix systems because they’re very productive for programmers. For programmers, there was never anything like Unix before it came along. Programmers and software jocks were the cobbler’s children of the computing world from the 60’s until the 80’s - companies investing in computers would often not give programmers a budget for tools. There was no standard set of tools on many systems. The first three jobs in my career, I re-wrote the same collection of tools I carried around with me on four different systems. When I got to a point where I was working on a Unix system, I didn’t have to write my tools. Every Unix system came with a bunch of tools that was largely the same from system to system. It was hugely liberating.
But for end users who just want to have a simple, lightweight system to use? Unix is hell.
A “tarball” is a collection of files into one file, the name of which ends in “.tar” or “.tar.gz” or “.tar.zip” or “.tar.bz” or something similar. The suffixes with something more than merely “.tar” are “compressed tar archives.”
When you get these tarballs, you uncompress them (if they were compressed) and then feed them into the tar program to unpack all the files out onto the disk, with a command like:
“$ tar xvf tarball.tar”
and you’ll see the ‘tar’ program extract all the files.
If the tarball were compressed (eg, with a .gz suffix), you’re uncompress the tarball and then feed it into tar:
“$ zcat tarball.tar.gz | tar xvf -”
and so on. The “zcat” command uncompressed the .gz file and writes the result to the “standard output.” If you didn’t re-direct the output into the tar program with the pipe “|” command, you’d get a huge screenful of stuff and then you’d be left with the original .gz file and no net results.
By shoving the output of the zcat command into the input of the ‘tar’ program, you’re seeing why Unix is a favorite among programmers. You don’t write one program to uncompress *and* un-tar a file. You have a program that only uncompresses the file and writes the result to the standard output. And then you have a file that creates or reads tar files.
In Unix, you use the power of of input/output redirection (the “pipes” facility) to glue these smaller, discrete programs together into more a much more capable system. That’s why programmers love Unix. And the complexity of this trivial example is why users who are not computer nerds hate Unix - often with a passion. I went through this example to give you an idea of why nerds love Unix and rave about it...
But you see why I don’t think Unix is going to take over the world of users who just want to browse the web and write spreadsheets and letters any time soon.
Heh... have to agree with you! Have had to maintain both Windows and Unix systems and I certainty agree with you, Unix systems can be hell! Never had so many silly problems with just printing! Oh well...
With that said... the latest versions of Unix or Linux or whatever you want to use... have similar interfaces as Windows. When they get to the same...look out, you can’t beat a free user programmed OS.
Yes...heh, they really do have to do away with the awful requirements of a Unix professional just to keep things going - after all, in today’s world, every teenager should be able to maintain a system! Unix is not ready for that yet but it is getting there... Windows is there now...
Actually, though Linux is said to be "unix-like," it's more accurate to say that Linux is derivative of Minix (Andrew Tanenbaum's original micro-kernel based teaching OS), and the history between the two is a good read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIX
Minix might be short for "mini unix" but it's not derived from Unix (Unix started out as a monolithic kernel, not a microkernel)
It sounds like George has some older Linux distro; I've not had to deal with tarballs for many years now. In fact, given that he's trying to run it on an old Win98 machine it is very likely it's an old distro, because more recent distros require more capability, though I'm running Xubuntu 9.04 on an old corporate discard machine.
And I actually use command line (or Run) on Windows more often than I open a Terminal window in Linux.
I've been trying out Linux desktops from 1998 on. At first it was on really underpowered hardware, which didn't help. And it required an expert to install -- there were tons of questions you had to answer. SuSE got close with 9.0 or 10.0; once up it was fine but installation still had problems. My first seamless install came with Kubuntu 7; no expert knowledge required, it identified the hardware and came up and ran.
Will Linux displace Windows? I think not, for reasons other posters have given. Not to mention there is one (series of) Windows and a wide variety of Linux distros, though it seems that the Ubuntu family (including Mint) is becoming the dominant Linux desktop system.
But something else I've seen in the corporate world is a gradual encroachment by Apple. Eight years ago all the laptops in my technical committees' meetings were Windows. But the number of Apples has been increasing, to maybe 10% of the machines today. (One Linux laptop for at least six years now and no, it's not mine.)
Granted, folks like me will almost always use the command line tools, (because of the power, flexibility and speed you get with them), but they aren't required these days. The great thing is that you have both options available to you if you want them. I'm just glad we have choice of what we want to use in general. If you're happy with MS-windows and the virus scanners, anti-spyware tools, and the abortion that is the windows registry, that go with it, that's great! More power to you, and I wish you well with it. If you prefer OSX, that's great too. Us Unix folk could learn a little about usability from Apple. The fact that we have options is a good thing and just goes to show that it takes lots of different type of folks to make a world.
I agree with the basics of what you are saying (Unix is not really user friendly, but is really programmer-friendly), but the example of tar is not demonstrative because Aunt Tillie won’t be using tar.
She’ll be using whatever the GUI version is that comes packaged in Gnome/Java Desktop (gnome)/KDE/etc. Even in the UI impoverished world of Unix, there are plenty of UI apps to handle compressed files of many kinds.