Comment Just Wrong (Score 1) 383
Less useful but still useful are command shells.
Really?
You obviously do not get it if you do not understand the Jedi Power of a person who has mastered the shell. Pick a shell. When you think you have mastered the shell, experiment with other shells. Hell, change your shell to perl, I know a couple of perl junkies who run that way.
Sometime when you are bored, and have more that three brain cells on shift, from the command line (that would be a shell prompt) execute "man init" on your favorite Unix, and read the page. Then read the init scripts. {sarcasm}no, the shell is not useful{/sarcasm}
In a Unix Xwindows environment (or in MacOS X for that matter), the GUI is a tool, a nice place for multiple graphical proggies to play together, and an easy way to have multiple terminals open and visible at once. If you are an absolute luddite, get yourself an old VT101 terminal, learn how to plumb in a serial terminal to your machine, and explore the wonders of tmux.
Happy new year
-Red