I have a love/hate relationship with Nethack’s Sokoban levels.

A long lost host (a machine that’s been offline or in a closed off network etc.) can find its master (puppetserver) when it sees the daylight again with the regularily polling puppet agent service. This is not as straightforward with ansible’s push model.

stoner couch

Stealing this one!

The point was that the lines are pretty blurred nowadays.

No, they’re apps.

I get it. That’s why I included the part about “the family tech guy”. And I think some sparkle of interest must be had in order to learn about that stuff. Or any stuff, like learning Ancient Greek. One has to be able to use a web search (or write a prompt to an LLM) for “beginner install linux” or some such. If the spark isn’t there, maybe buying a new Windows/Mac is the correct way to go.

Life is a long learning experience. Installing (or asking that nerdy relative to install) a Linux distro is no biggie anymore and when picking a good all-around distro like Mint, for example, pretty much anyone who has some basic experience on computers can do it.

Needing to use command line for some things that should be a right click

Right click where? All major DE’s/WM’s implement stuff in their own way. The problem here is we don’t (and won’t) have a unified GUI that everyone uses, unlike the other two main OS’s. (Note: I don’t see this as a problem, more as a result of the FLOSS ecosystem being such a rich soil to build stuff on.)

I think Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning was the Command Line has some valid points even today.