Re: Ubuntu (Linux); my first experience of...

"Jan Panteltje" <pNaonStpealmtje@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:es1gvb$kv2$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The most common response to a problem is "RTFM"
Exactly, there are thousands of pages of documentation, do you want somebody
else do read them for you? And do the googling?

I think his point is that, for Linux to become (massively) successful, the
average Linux hacker (and I mean that in the good way -- someone who's
intimiately familiar with Linux) needs to treat the new user as he would his
grandmother asking for help with a computer: Yes, steering them to a good
on-line or printed resource is good, but simply answering the question garners
a lot more goodwill than just telling them to get lost. In the Windows and
Mac world there are many people whose entire jobs are answering "dumb"
questions from users, and if you're looking at taking a good-sized company
from, e.g., Windows to Linux, there are always many OS-illiterate employees
that the company has commited to "supporting" since they're (supposedly :-) )
good as whatever the core aspect of their job is.

Like driving a car, you need training.

Guess where people learn to use Windows? In school and at their employers.
This emphasizes parts of what I said before -- when someone chooses to try out
Linux after having used Windows or the Mac OS, they're generally going it
alone, and the last thing Linux advocates should be doing to those Linux noobs
is just telling them to get lost and RTFM. (But again, there's nothing wrong
with *politely* answering a question and pointing them to the appropriate
resource to read for more details...)

Linux is in my view a very powerful OS, but that power is only available if
you know how to
use it.
It has an enormous learning curve, that _never_ ends, as millions of
programmers keep
enhancing it day in day out.

What you view as "powerful" many would view as "unstable." :-) Corporations
don't *want* to hear that "millions of programmers keep 'enhancing' Linux
everday" *unless* you add on, "...while retraining core compatibility with all
the legacy data and applications that you've spent millions of dollars
creating." Microsoft has become quite good at this, BTW. I've previously
mentioned how, where my mother works, they run Windows XP on multi-GHz Dell
PCs along with... WordPerfect 4.2 for DOS! Every single work day of the year.
All day long. Aieee....

---Joel


.

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