I wanted to try out a few Linux applications, so just installed Ubuntu as a VMware virtual machine within Windows.
VMware prompted me to install the VMware tools, and put a virtual CD-rom on the Ubuntu desktop, containing both an rpm and a tar.gz archive. Couldn't work out how to do anything with the rpm file, so I managed to extract the tar.gz archive into a folder on the desktop, and with the help of Google, worked out that I needed to open a Terminal window, cd into the appropriate directory, and use sudo to execute a Perl install script. And it worked fine.
I'm aware that it's possible to easily install a vast variety of applications via Applications > Add/Remove or other flavours of package manager. And that it's not possible for every app can be found here.
I used the command prompt quite a bit back in the DOS days, which is how I guessed the cd command. I also understand that such an operation needs elevated privileges, thus the sudo command.
My question is why the operation needs the use of a command prompt at all - why can I not double click on an install script file, and then be prompted to supply extra credentials if required? Or right-click and 'Run as root', or some other operation within the GUI?
Please don't take this as a "Why isn't Linux more like Windows" rant - I'm genuinely interested in any answers.