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

[Bob Kline]

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.  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 project's documentation) they get sent to habitually out of date Wikis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.
>

Speaking of "good documentation," what's
that any more?  Man pages are pretty minimal,
where they exist at all any more, and mostly suggest
you read something somewhere else.  Man pages
go back to the earliest Unix, and why they have
been more or less abandoned in recent years is
unclear.  In the past they were the documentation.

And "HowTo" pages.  I don't see them referred to
much in this group.  Is that still a current concept?
i.e., do people write them any more, or keep them
current, or is most information now at project
sites and spread over endless blogs and Q&A websites?

A guess is that that how-to information is better
for more stable projects.  But one often enough
reads that the authors don't have time to write
documentation.

    -- Bob
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