[GRLUG] Newbie Distos [Was: Re: Upgrading Firefox]

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> As a noob years ago, I found debian's website to be very cold and hard 
>to find useful information.  It does not appear to have changed much since.
> Part of the package that the noob needs is the "what to do when your 
> geek friend has gone home."  One thing Ubuntu has done a pretty good job 
> with is being approachable.

This is one of the non-technical things that really irritates me about
Ubuntu.  This logic is flawed and a "newbie" should be disabused of it,
not indulged.  How-to-do-X-on-disto-Y is mostly of the time a waste of
time - back to the fact that it is 99.44% the same software as every
other distro.  How to setup a Samba server (beyond what is supported by
whatever wizards are provided), or customize your printer setup, etc...
are all very distribution agnostic.  If you lurk on many project lists
for long you'll see this manifest a lot: I'm-running-X-how-can-I-Y?  The
answer is pretty much inevitably: see the *project* documentation
because the fact you are using X just doesn't matter.  Even if there is
a distribution specific problem or bug - the specific project is more
likely to know as they all *use* the specific software in question.
This ends up frustrating the "newbie" because instead of going to where
people know answers (the specific project) or to good documentation (the
project's documentation) they get sent to habitually out of date Wikis
and huge mail lists predominated by people who don't know more than they
do.