There's no shame in that - you can't do everything from a shell like you can't do everything from X. Can you imagine BASH-Gimp? heeheee....... yeah, i'm nuts.

All these stories remind me how I started with Solaris. Working at a large corporation, I was thrust into a position that required me to tweak a couple of ksh scripts. I had next to no experience in *nix and called over a Solaris admin to help me out. At one point he says to me (this is how I understood it then) "vee-I et-see profile" and I'm thinking what language is this guy speaking? klingon?

i've always been a windows user too, i've been trying to learn it since last year. I kept installing it, and uninstalling it. I had so much trouble with it basically. Its a big headache to learn Linux. It created problems with my girlfriend, do poorly in school, and lost alot of hair. I can't understand why, but for some reason, I just love it. It's so damn cool to know a OS that the guys/girls at college don't know. I feel so powerful by typing a " cd /usr/local" and "./program "

Bottom line, It takes a long time to learn Linux, but in the end its all worth it. Also don't turn out like me and start installing everything you find on synaptic (for debian users I guess), like trying to install GNOME on knoppix =X . Just take things slow, read the README files, if you have questions goto the discussion forums on the particular distro (www.knoppix.net , mandrakesoft.com, www.redhat.com etc).

anyway, just my two cents.

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not at all actually. when it comes down to it, you just can not practically include every function in a gui app that is a frontend for a command line tool.
you can not use gui apps in shell scripts, (which would very much help your problem of adding 20 users, which by the way, would be just as tedious if done from a gui app)

the command line is where the power is, you have full control of your system, and to be quite honest, most CLI tools are NOT hard to learn. people just dont want to RTFM!!

for your desktop machine, of course you are going to want a GUI, i use KDE on my desktop. but if you think there is X at all on my server you are wrong. it is unecessary overhead. you dont need GUI apps to administer your server.

and my final point, those who become dependant on GUI apps will never become proficient at adminstering their systems. not every place is going to have the same gui apps, and some probably none at all. standard command line tools generally do not change accross platforms very much at all, and if there are differences, you have one command that (usually) will always be there:
man

one more thing, a mouse is inherently clumsy. even GUI apps have hotkeys to avoid using the slow mouse. you will be 100x faster at a command line than in X with a mouse.

It is much faster to work on filesystems and system administration tasks using the command line. I don't use the command line 'because it looks cool', but because it is much faster when doing the tasks I need to do.

Neo