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

On a sunny day (Tue, 27 Feb 2007 10:12:08 -0800) it happened "Joel Kolstad"
<JKolstad71HatesSpam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in <12u8t3oa7v68325@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

"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,

I am going to answer this -as i read it- (because it is so long), so,
definitions of 'successful'... Linux IS and always was successful for me.
I had DRDOS 6 and win 3.1 at that time, and programming for it was problematic,
DOS memory limit, expensive compile, I used djgpp (free) for DOS, win 3.1
sucked but was fun.
Linux gave me the gcc compiler, no memory limits, good multitasking right then
and there, X windows system, networked, all for free.
A winner, clear choice, now I could write what I wanted.
'Massively' successful it was as thousands like me immediately moved to it.
But if your idea of 'massively' includes the secretary, the one that when asked to make
a copy of a floppy disk put it in the xerox, then NO Linux was at least at that time,
not aimed at that.

You are possibly confusing this with the bloat GUIs like KDE and Gnome that actually
try to imitate MS desktops, and those are brought to - and sold to the masses
by the like of Suse-Balmer and Rathead, that is NOT Linux, that runs on top of Linux.
'Linux' is a simple multitasking kernel (well not so simple anymore really).
It still has, and will always have, that command line interface MS killed to kill Digital
research's DRDOS, that was a better MSDOS.
Linux needs no GUI, not that what _you_ think the masses want.
So if S-B and RH sell 'Linux', no they sell their bloat on top of it, make a quick buck,
then sell out to MS it seems.
Rathead has been responsible in the past for many incompatibilities in libc for example,
all 'customer binding', and Suse is good at the same too.

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:

The Linux programmer (me in this case) does not give a *** about what anybody wants,
*I* write programs that do what *I* need, and you can use these, improve these,
learn from these, or delete these, I do not give a f*ck.
This is _ N O T _ a commercial 'must sell' policy.
It is all created (most of it anyways) by individual users / programmers for _THEIR_
needs.
You have no right, you have no right to say 'you should', you have to right to ask
for a feature, but neither I nor nobody else is required to implement it for you.


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.

To say RTFM is the same as saying to the aspirant driver: take driving lessons.
But you want me to pay for your taxi.


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 committed to "supporting" since they're (supposedly :-) )
good as whatever the core aspect of their job is.

Ah, you do not even get an answer from MS support, even if you try, if you can reach them,
and then they tell you to re-install.
And they get payed.


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 _not_ for dummies.



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....

Yes, I have used WP, and it was a joke, and I was technical author at that time.
It all depends, if you want to make layouts for a magazine with pictures,
or write C code, or just do correspondence, you may need different tools.
All these tools are there for Linux.
I write this with joe as text editor.
Best one yet, Wordstar like feeling.
But I also write C, and html, asm, etc with 'joe'.
And it is not a graphical editor, it works on the command line too.

Take some time to learn Unix, if you are technical (this is s.e.d after all),
for example I am now in the middle of figuring out this:
http://drc-fir.sourceforge.net/doc/drc.html#htoc1
it needs fftw and brutefir.. and does something with room correction for sound.
or sound correction for rooms....
Do you think I master this in 5 minutes?
Do you think I am going to ask in a newsgroup for help on this?
That way it would take years.
Do you think the office girl can do this?

See, _Linux_ or at least the applications available for Unix (there are many Unices)
for such a vast field, scientific, that involves so many fields of expertise, and
all that good stuff freely available as open source, at _LEAST_ take the time to
learn, else keep buying broken feature limited MS crap without source.
For ever their slave, your PC finally taken away from you and made a black box
where every little thing has a big DRM lock on it, and nothing is changed,
nothing evolves, everything ever takes more resources... the darkness of Redmond falling
on the world.
THAT system must have caused more irritation with its crashes and blue screens to more people
then anything else in the world.
And it made one man rich beyond belief, and everybody looks up to that person,
and guess what, he has no more clue about life's secrets..Money cannot buy that...then most
other people.
Now there is an interesting subject, before we learn all this, we should learn about ourselves,
about how our neural net works, what real truth is, do meditation.
One big EMP may come if Whitehouse ape starts nuking ..and no more computers...
And we will still have to know how to be happy.
Priorities.







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