I know you already pointed out your sample is heavily biased, but to reiterate: macOS users you know predominantly from computer science and adjacent engineering fields are a very skewed sample. You can say that sprinkling terminal usage into a middle school computer literacy class is worthwhile, and I might even agree. But to treat it as anything more than something used by enthusiasts, programmers, IT professionals, scientists (on a very basic level that can be learned in 10 minutes), teenagers trying to look badass, and the one-in-a-million frustrated “normie” user who falls into it through some troubleshooting/game modding/etc. tutorial simply isn’t realistic.
Regarding ping: what good is it going to do a normal user who doesn’t understand basic networking? It can rarely tell me basic useful information, like that my DNS is fucked up (can’t get to websites but can ping). For normal users it’ll just tell them the Internet isn’t working, which they probably already figured out, but how do they resolve it? Pictured: a normal user who can use ping figuring out their Internet isn’t working. To make something like ping meaningfully useful, you need to teach them basic Layer 3 concepts too, which is fine, but that’s not a terminal skill – that’s networking skills with a trivial terminal command stapled on.
As a computer science student, I haven’t met anyone that didn’t use terminal on Mac. I am heavily biased.
Also, I think ping is actually very useful for a normal user. Not nearly as useful as (any) office software, but still.
I know you already pointed out your sample is heavily biased, but to reiterate: macOS users you know predominantly from computer science and adjacent engineering fields are a very skewed sample. You can say that sprinkling terminal usage into a middle school computer literacy class is worthwhile, and I might even agree. But to treat it as anything more than something used by enthusiasts, programmers, IT professionals, scientists (on a very basic level that can be learned in 10 minutes), teenagers trying to look badass, and the one-in-a-million frustrated “normie” user who falls into it through some troubleshooting/game modding/etc. tutorial simply isn’t realistic.
Regarding
ping: what good is it going to do a normal user who doesn’t understand basic networking? It can rarely tell me basic useful information, like that my DNS is fucked up (can’t get to websites but can ping). For normal users it’ll just tell them the Internet isn’t working, which they probably already figured out, but how do they resolve it? Pictured: a normal user who can usepingfiguring out their Internet isn’t working. To make something likepingmeaningfully useful, you need to teach them basic Layer 3 concepts too, which is fine, but that’s not a terminal skill – that’s networking skills with a trivial terminal command stapled on.