Truckloads of lies, halftruths, uncertainties, alternative facts and all those other useless statements drown the truth until it becomes almost impossible to discern it.
History has been there before. Due to advances in communication this time will be worse.
Be smart and believe what you have evidence for. Never spread something without making sure.
Quite the opposite. Walking people through terminal commands is a pain. Cryptic commands that often obscure their true meaning and functionality, where every typo leads to failure.
On the other hand, asking someone to open "Software" and just click on the "Install" button of whatever they searched for is infinitely better than explaining how to update the package index, add a repo and so forth.
And that's just installing software.
New kernel? The average user shouldn't know about that. Just install it with an OS upgrade.
File editing? Stop opening explanations with "sudo nano...", start with "open your favourite text editor". Or better: " click on settings and activate option xyz."
And so forth.
I use the terminal myself. Sometimes because I want to. Often because I have to. I wish I had the option more often.
GUIs made computers/operating systems accessible. In fact, I would argue that we need even less command line in Linux distributions for the most common tasks and even those beyond that. The hardcore Linux fan won't agree, I guess, but IMO that's one of the ongoing needs in Linux accessibility and wider acceptance.
Good example is YasT in OpenSuse. A GUI for much of the stuff other distributions require knowledge of terminal commands, though it really is for Sys. Admins.
Mint and its big daddy Ubuntu have done well for the average user. I hope that this trend will continue and companies will support Linux better than they are now.
This has been mentioned a few times here. Didn't know that. Thank you.