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My (unintentional) Command Line Challenge was trying to build Gentoo on a 100MHz laptop with no other computers around. That was about 2 days of compute work. At the time, it didn't compile reliably either, so emerge would crash 5-10 times while trying to get to Xorg. Learning to fix the problems, particularly via lynx, brought me up to speed more quickly than anything else.

Something to be said for leaning by immersion.

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I agree with your general point, but configuring Xorg is a form of torture no man deserves to go through.

Hah, kids these days. Xorg is a DREAM compared to it's predecessors X11 and friends.

Xorg is fine today, it's pretty much automatic. I'm talking about 6 or 7 years ago when you had to dive into xorg.conf to get 75% of graphics cards to work.

Similar!

I was using Debian on a compaq dual 200MHz Pentium Pro desktop until about '02. I was pretty much 100% of the time on the shell so I really didn't need anything more.

Mutt for email, irssi for IRC, links for browser, vi for the editor and a 512k ADSL connection. That was about it.

The whole machine cost me 10GBP (about $15). It replaced an old Sun machine I found in a skip in 1997.

I bought my first new computer in 2004 :)

The console rocks.

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