> At this one startup I was at, I asked one of the fresh grad hires who had a really neat looking terminal what his Oh My Zsh plugins did. He couldn't name more than two and didn't really know them. I asked him what a process' exit status was and somehow he didn't know it.

> All of the other fresh grad hires tried to use Ubuntu systems with a Windows XP mindset.

I've written about this on HN before, but the fact is that for many, having a pleasant experience on the terminal is a prerequisite for them taking the time to actually learn the basics. The the terminal emulator isn't a pleasant, cozy place to work in even for newbies, people won't stick around to learn fundamentals like exit statuses or job control.

By the same token, there are a lot of people with little previous command-line experience who respond very well to some friendlier defaults in their shell, and become much more interested in further customizing their experience and learning about the Unix environment.