The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

Posted Feb 27, 2004 16:50 UTC (Fri) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550)
In reply to: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org) by jorvalho
Parent article: The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

> Because "regular" end users should not have to install an operating system.

But regular users may very reasonably want to add printer access to their system, or add it to a network which already has a printer somewhere.

> If your new computer came with Debian pre-installed, all you had to do from > that moment on was upgrade with APT.

They might just possibly also want to alter configurations of various sorts. The whole point of the article was that tools intended to assist this process far too often make it harder instead.

The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

Posted Feb 27, 2004 18:04 UTC (Fri) by jcollardx01 (guest, #13784) [Link] (1 responses)

I agree whole heartedly. As a Linux newbie (who has been reading LWN for about 6 months.) I spent 5-6 hours this week figuring out how to add an application (eclipse) to the KDE menu AND GET IT RUNNING! All the documentation I found just kept repeating how to get it on the menu -- nothing anywhere about different ways to actually get it to run, what parameters to pass where, etc.

I've been programming for 15 years on DOS/Windows boxes, yet it took me this long to get a simple menu item working. If I were to contribute to Linux... It would be on a documentation project.

The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story (catb.org)

Posted Feb 27, 2004 19:41 UTC (Fri) by allesfresser (guest, #216) [Link]

>If I were to contribute to Linux... It would be on a documentation project.

Then please do... as you can see, it's badly needed.