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

[Michael Mol]

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Adam Tauno
Williams<awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:
>
>> 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.

I only partially disagree with your premise; By taking things in-house
and changing things in a distro-local fashion, the process of
switching between distributions is made even more difficult than the
process of switching from Windows to Linux.  At the risk of Godwinning
the thread..."Embrace and Extend".

Most of what Ubuntu cleans up for the newbie could be done at a lower
level than a GUI applet, and putting that logic in the GUI applet
breaks the component model behind UNIX.  If you take much of that
logic (yes, even configuration wizardry) and implement it in the form
of a background daemon, you need only create a client for the
background daemon, and clients can be written for whatever end
environment needed.  NetworkManager is a step in that direction, but
there are only GUI clients for it available in the Ubuntu repos.

As a thought exercise:  Consider applications offering their
configuration options as Glade scripts.  Config daemon passes those
scripts on to the configuration client, and the configuration client
formats them in whatever format is needed.


> 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.

Yeah.  Until you wind up with a scenario where the operating system's
wizardry overwrites your configuration scripts.

> 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.

True in other mediums as well.  Go to #linux and ask a question about
doing something.  Even if what you need to do doesn't involve Ubuntu's
wizardry, if they catch on that you're using Ubuntu, you'll be sent to
#ubuntu.  Then all hope is lost; There's no such thing as load
balancing questions in a chatroom.  The same thing used to be true of
#linux and #debian, but #debian had more trolls that liked to insult
people in it.


-- 
:wq