Although its just another OS, linux does have a major learning curve for the common GUI enjoyer like me.
When you all were first learning linux, did you have a specific resource you learned from? Was it more like doing projects and learning on the way through forums?
I tried with Mandrake back in the 90s. It was Ubuntu that really clicked for me though. Once I understood what “apt” was, it changed my world. It took all the difficulty out of administering my computer. Windows didn’t really work all that well in those days. Apt changed everything. I could outsource my administration to the distro maintainers. Windows just became a toy. With Linux I could have pretty much anything the way I wanted, and I didn’t have to do anything other than install a package.
BTW, It’s perfectly possible to administer your system with just GUIs. It’s just easier to use the command line once you’re used to it. The Windows command line isn’t very powerful, and has fallen to the wayside. But you can do really powerful things there that are difficult to represent or share visually from a *nix system. That tends to make it popular for helping others.
CMD is a toy if you ask me. Basically, there are very few options for customization regarding it, not to mention group policies, things that are really needed in production environments, like AD… nope, no tools to export “just this policy”, you export the whole thing, then you filter things out (you don’t actually export only one thing you need, nope, you have to filter/delete everything out and just leave that one thing you DO need in there, lol 😂), and then you import it back again… I mean, WTF 😂.
Ah, but we have PowerShell for that… yeah, right, as if I’m gonna learn your whole complex C# based syntax that just doesn’t make sense most of the time (this is done like this, but this other thing, that is very similar to this one, nope, that is done completely different 😤) just so that I can export and tweak this one policy I need to automate loading on new installs. And why am I even doing this? Because apparently, AD can’t handle that. Why? MS doesn’t seem to be interested in implementing that as a group policy across AD, just locally with no global control over it… go figure 🤷.
So I just use the quick and dirty approach regarding stuff like that. See what reg entries the policy changes, make a cmd script that does those changes via regadd, load that script as runonce in AD, done. Mind you, this doesnct actually reflect what is done in gpedit, it just loads the settings without gpedit ever knowing about that. Such BS, I hate it 😒.