I agree with you that a general impulse people have, especially with regard to devices like computers, is, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” People won’t switch to Linux in hordes if they are comfortable with Windows. And people won’t switch to a CLI if they are comfortable with GUIs galore.

I don’t really expect people to switch to CLIs, to be honest. I think GUIs have significant advantages from the point of view of the way people learn to navigate “computer spaces”. But the problem arises when people get the impression that everything is better done in a GUI. Most people in typical office jobs do tons of tasks which could be 10 lines of a shell script but instead they choose to “point, click, drag” however many times it takes, sometimes 500 or 1000 times. I don’t expect everyone to be a programmer, but I do think people can “empower” their use of a computer more, at least more than they do now.

“They don’t know the difference between Linux and Windows. When you tell them that Linux is an OS so is Windows, they’ll ask you ‘So?’” I think this is an important point. And I think it’s partially what Microsoft intended and likes about the current state of the market. Most people can understand the difference between Internet Explorer and Firefox, between OpenOffice and Microsoft Office, between TurboTax and Microsoft Money, even between gaim and AIM. (Anyone who doesn’t see difference between two applications doesn’t use a computer enough to care about just about anything related to technology…)

But many people understand application differences, but don’t really understand what an operating system does, why it’s important to have one other than Windows. And truthfully, it’s not very important, in this day and age thanks to the efforts of open source developers who have produced powerful cross-platform development toolkits, like XUL, SWT, wxWidgets, and the like.

But the truth is that Linux is a culture, a way of computing, a methodology, more than just an operating system kernel and some pieces of F/OSS software. Using Linux is a way of saying, “I embrace the software commons, I embrace taking control of my computer, I don’t place myself in the hands of a monopolist of the software industry, I am part of a living, breathing organism and its name is open source.”

Discussions like these always remind me of a great article, written a few years ago. You should read it:

http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/05/cov_12feature.html

The only thing that I find is that you say that people say that graphical user interfaces are “better” than the CLI. The problem is (I’m talking by experience) that people do not want to learn other things. They don’t know the difference between Linux and Windows. When you tell them that Linux is an OS so is Windows, they’ll ask you “So?”. They want what they’re used to in both sides, not to learn new things. Me, as a programmer, I want to learn everything, I don’t care. Accountants that are not geeks and just want to get things done the way they know it. If it is not possible to do it that way on Linux, they’ll tell you that it is useless and will go back to Windows, which is a shame.
However, in the past years, Linux has gone a long way since its obscure ways of being (Corel Linux 1.0 November 1999 for example) and people are now looking more into it; they didn’t discover Linux’s goodnesses, but they’ve discovered very similar and easy-to-adapt-to ways to do things the ways they’re used to in Windows. As you correctly pointed out, Microsoft has found as well some of Linux’s goodnesses (I’m talking about the CLI specifically) and are trying to get it into their products; although, at their current state, I strongly believe they failed to do so.

Keep on these great writings!!!