I think you nailed it though when you say that GUI interfaces are simpler. It’s true– the command-line is not intuitive for a newcomer, and there’s a steep learning curve before you can really be productive. That’s why a lot of people prefer to point-and-click their way through tasks. However, you’ll notice for tasks that repeat themselves again and again, power users will find the right keyboard shortcut and use it instead of the mouse, because it’s *faster*. And that’s the whole idea behind using the terminal– when your fingers stay near the home-row, you can work much faster. It’s amazing to watch a VIM power-user at work. The editor has so much capability built in, it’s a full-fledged IDE on it’s own. And all without leaving the keyboard.

In short, I believe users flock to GUI alternatives because they are simple and easy. But if programming is to be your profession, it doesn’t make sense to take the easy way out. Learn the set of tools that allow you to be the most productive. Overcoming the barrier-to-entry will set you apart from your colleagues that opt for what’s easy instead. College is the time to push yourself, and you’ll thank yourself later.

Perhaps because of habit and maybe even because they’ve never learned to type properly. As David said, graphical front ends even for fairly simple CLI-based programs probably would make them easier to use for habitual mousers. Then, even if you show them what’s possible, they’ll find miraculously rich and powerful programs like Emacs too difficult to use or even completely inaccessible. Of course the inefficient point & click / GUI element driven function access habit isn’t an easy habit to break and you’ve got to be motivated to want to break it in the first place. Maybe your uni. could get a guru in to give a demo so that they can see what they are losing out on, then arrange some touch-typing lessons.

I was on course staff for a freshman-level course last semester, and they’re not using Linux at all anymore (they basic Makefiles when I took it previously.) The faculty decided to transition the course entirely to Java and Eclipse, with the belief that the next era of CS majors will be working entirely in IDE’s, and without the shell at all. I disagree.

As far software development goes, learning how to use Linux and its various backend “terminal” applications could be useful, but the point of Computer Science is to abstract the machine as much as possible and focus on using software to accomplish tasks by putting functions together. It seems like every tool on your list already exists on windows and could be made easier with a graphical frontend: then CS majors could focus on their code rather than what arguments to add after they type “gcc”. Why dont you develop a frontend for these tools to make Linux easier than Windows to develop on? A good UI is so much more intuitive than searching through man pages.

Don’t even get me started on how bad of an idea it is to encourage students to mess up their partition tables with Linux installs. It’s better to make them want to do it on their own.

A friend who is a university lecturer tells me that the first year of CS courses are ‘wasted’ as the majority of students are users of Microsoft, and have very little actual knowledge about computers, programming, etc.

Take a look at the Linux Professional Institute curriculum for ideas – google for LPIC-1, LPIC-2 or LPIC-3

My academic career involves theoretical and applied linguistics, and while knowing perl, grep, sed, R, and awk (among other things) are not mandatory it certainly helps (and no, I don’t claim to be an expert…). Sometimes it helps A LOT. And that’s for a non-CS major…the need would, I imagine, be even greater for someone that is aiming for a career within the CS field.

As far as the cringing aspect goes, I suspect that is at least partially due to the shell-aspect. Still, a CS major should in my opinion be required to have at the very least a basic knowledge of shells (*ix or otherwise).

While not a CS-major, some of my past work-experience involves maintaining both *ix servers (and desktops) as well as the windows equivalents. As bad as the windows equivalents of a shell can be – at least if you’re not accustomed to the RealThing…, it is never wrong to be able to utilize a computer without the aid of visual metaphors. In my experience, sooner you will have to. No matter what OS you’re running. No, that’s not quite right. I should say that if you want to be efficient in administrating servers, you will have to. Well, unless you like the idea of having to do a lot of maintenance mind-dulling duties manually on a regular basis rather than automating things that is.

Even Microsoft has acknowledged that – why else would they have made sure their latest server edition can be run without a GUI or have released their shell powertools?