[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.
> 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

Maybe, but I think think the "component model behind UNIX" is mostly
mythical, like unicorns.  One mans "component model" is another mans
"What a hack!".  A great deal of what goes on under the guise of config
automation is nearer the second IMHO.

> 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.

Maybe I misunderstand but openSUSE uses the NetworkManager - I'm staring
at it.  I'm pretty sure it is an option on Fedora.  You are correct that
there are a couple of categories of distribution specific behaviors -
how they try to auto-mangle setup being one - but that is a fairly small
circle.  And fortunately there seems to be some convergence underway
[under the auspices of the FreeDesktop spec/group?].

> 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.

Would be interesting, but that is an entirely different thread: why
can't Open Source projects cooperate regarding configuration management?
The discussion inevitably gets drowned out by people screaming about how
the Windows registry sucks [although that isn't remotely gernmane].
I've watched that too often to be very interested.  For anything to
really work well you need fairly pervasive up-stream buy-in.

For a great example: Why do I have to configure authentication for PAM,
every @*^&&(*$@ web app installed, apache, CUPS, etc... Why can't I just
configure "this is how my system authenticates users"?

> > 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.

IRC has a kind of magickal gravity that seems to attract and gather
trolls even more rapidly than other kinds of channels.

The best, not perfect, solution is to education newer uses to go
upstream for help.  

A developer/maintainer of project X has a high probability of being
aware of how Ubuntu/openSUSE/Fedora trashes their config files. :)  More
likely anyway than anyone on ubuntu/opensuse/fedora-discuss.