Red Hat-LaTeX

I helped a total newby to write her Ph.D. thesis in Vim/LaTeX (it worked!). Main experiences (it was a several-months "experiment"):

concept problems with the bash shell (at the beginning, didn't really understand what "cd" did, for example)
didn't know how to start a new document (documentclass, usepackages, begin/end document...)
ocasional confusions between vi/dvi/xdvi (general non-understanding of what each program does/is called)
why does the mouse wheel not work with xdvi? (constant beeping)
sometimes, needed my help to solve TeX compilation errors; was glad that everything is understandable and makes ultimately sense, but it is also very time-consuming to fix some well-hidden syntax errors (even with help of syntax-highlighting)
no crashes (ever) + no document corruption (ever) -> no work losses (very good!)
had to use convert for dealing with different image formats; it worked ok; sometimes, the location of the picture files caused confusion
successfully used konsole with two tabs (although I gave her the idea) for editing + processing
sometimes, the changes in a figure were not apparently reflected in the dvi file (because was looking at a different, similar, figure) -> a problem not encountered in WYSIWYG programs!