[aklug] Re: Basic Linux information

From: larry collier <larry@medease.com>
Date: Wed Sep 16 2009 - 15:03:36 AKDT

Arthur, when you 'read the manual' you understand what it means. When I
read the manual, mostly, I get the feeling it's written in some foreign
language. I've been doing this a long time, and yes I'm basically a
user. I'm neither geek nor hacker and aspire to neither one. But I'm
way above average mentally and have a hell of a time understanding most
of the man pages out there.

Todays linux is not the one you started with. I started with rh4.1.
It fit on one CD and didn't fill that. The latest from rh, fills a dvd
and is missing a lot of stuff a home user will want. There is a huge
difference between starting out back then and starting now.

Wanting a new user to read the manual, which isn't comprehensible until
you've read about a thousand of them will surely stop just about all new
users. Without new users linux is doomed. I'd rather have something
they can use right away because, BS aside, for most people Windows works
out of the box tolerably well. And of course most people never install it.

We have something better, but our attitude (and totally crap
documentation) will doom it.

Larry

Arthur Corliss wrote:
> Wow. I may have to come out of lurker mode for this one.
>
> On Wed, 16 Sep 2009, larry collier wrote:
>
>
>> Social diatribes aside, I think we, aklug, would do a great service by
>> choosing a base distro that's out there already and adding to that all
>> the parts, like flash, that get left out due to political positions
>> (it's not open source!). So any one can take a disk put it in their
>> machine, and boot to a desktop quickly, that just works for all the
>> most common things people do with a home system.
>>
>> I've used linux for over 10 years and still don't have the above. It's
>> beyond my available time to do it alone but would love to help.
>>
>> And it's a PITA, when I need a system up fast to go figure out why my
>> main system isn 't working but then spend 3 hours figuring out why
>> Debian won't let me do something fundamental like mount a flash drive.
>>
>> Most of us don't live on top of step pyramids with obsidian knives --
>> and don't want to. Elitist RTFM does no one any good.
>>
>> Larry
>>
>
> I may not agree with Marc's position entirely, but I think you guys are way
> out of line trotting out the "elitist" tag. That's like all the morons
> claiming *any* criticism of Pres. Obama racism. That's bull, and we all
> know it.
>
> For the record, I do lean more towards Marc's side than anywhere else.
> Think about it: how come so many of the hoary old timers, many of which are
> still on the list, are predominantly lurkers? Some of it is priorities, but
> a large portion of it is simple exhaustion. There's only so many times one
> can answer the same questions over and over again. Especially when we all
> know it's been thoroughly documented on the Internet for literally years.
>
> Quite frankly, I think the so-called "geek" community needs to be ashamed of
> themselves. Geeks used to be hackers, but now they're not. They're users.
> Users with little inclination to learn, break things apart, and build new
> things. In short, if we had to start the Linux revolution all over today,
> it wouldn't happen, becuase we simply don't have the people interested
> enough to make it so.
>
> So, you want to call RTFM elitism? I call RTFM a base expectation. If
> someone RTFMs and still doesn't understand, I'm more than happy to explain.
> But if you're not willing to RTFM, you had better be an aging relative, or
> don't expect to be spoon fed. I don't have the energy to do that beyond my
> bloodlines.
>
>
> Your Grouchy Neighborhood Elist,
>
>
> Arthur Corliss
>
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Received on Wed Sep 16 15:07:16 2009

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