Sounds good
> how to bring up a terminal, ssh to another machine
Uhh, even as a developer I barely ever feel I need to do this (and frankly, I do this quite often).
Being able to ssh into another machine is extremely low on the list of things to learn before being proficient.
I doubt they even know about terminals to be honest. Simply not needed.
It's not just about launching programs and moving files around one by one.
A decent shell, like bash, is fully programmable. It lets you express yourself in ways that no GUI does, possibly excepting LabView or Scratch.
I also think that even if this was taught from the beginning - it'd remain a power user thing.
But I agree, I use automation/scripting/bash every day and would be horrified to loose this ability. But I also know other developer who doesn't use it at all.
I agree with you but you couldn't have chosen a worse example. Mass renaming, tagging or formatting of files is one of the most performed operations of an everyday user and is a massive time sink for people who don't know how to programmatically do it.
Classification of downloaded music or movies is very common. Same goes for moving files around and renaming folders and mass-moving documents. I remember when I had to re-format around 1000 images for a friend of mine because he wanted a different size + format to create some photo album. Just a couple of imagemagick lines vs him and I manually spending a lot of hours doing it painstakingly picture by picture.
I am very comfortable in the terminal but I'd still /prefer/ a GUI tool.
Do you think kids still care about privacy? As in, the giving all your life details to google kind, not the public Facebook profile kind.