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.
“As another poster mentioned, the use of zcat and pipelining is quite unnecessary, and has been for years with modern versions of tar, which understand and can deal with gzip, or bzip compression alorythms.”
Yes, for the GNU version of tar, you’re right. For some other versions, eg, Solaris, no. And I’d guesstimate that I’ve used SunOS/Solaris more than any two other variants of Unix, so you can tell I’m a bona fide dinosaur. In thinking about it, I’ve used V7, BSD 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, SunOS, Xenix, Venix, A/UX, Ultrix, SysVR2, SysVR3, Solaris, HP-UX, Irix... Linux, FreeBSD and now OS X. I forget what the variant on Wang machines was called.
I think that’s all of them. I list all of those on a resume as one OS - under “Unix” because I haven’t the time left in life to worry about religion of one vs. the other. Do they have ‘sh’, can they fork a process, have pipes & redirection and do they have a C compiler? Close enough.
re: Usability in Unix: There’s a lesson from Apple that I think Unix hackers will never, ever learn. Apple makes software more usable with fewer options. Give a user more than five to seven options, and s/he will almost never remember them all; they’ll have to keep referring to the documentation or help string to get the right option. As the years have gone on, Unix hackers have added more and more knobs, switches and options to commands, which is going in the wrong direction.
Another source of frustration for many users is X11, if they have an uncommon video configuration. Then the excessive choices in window managers and attending options. If the Linux people wanted to get more people using Linux/Unix, they’d address the window manager issues, and come up with one clean, sufficiently powerful WM and a pretty standard configuration and ship that as the default. Last I looked, there’s ... what, about two dozen WM’s available on Linux now? Utterly insane.