On 2/11/19 5:31 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
I don't know what "m-/" means.
Facepalm.
Aha! Useful.
Like I said, I've only been doing online community support for about 30 years. I have found that people can be taught, and if they have questions, they'll ask them. That's part of what the community is for and what it does.
There are definitely people like that, yes. Not many of them -- a small minority of computer users, I'd say. For instance, a decade or so ago, I wrote a series of getting-started-with-Linux articles for the Register, and included some very simple commands to enable some additional repositories and add in packages for video playback and so on. In the comments, I was lambasted for this. "If you have to type anything, it's too hard. Ordinary users won't do that." Etc. Other commentators pointed out that with text commands, you could cut-and-paste them, and that meant they'd be error-free. Long descriptions of what to click can't be copied-and-pasted, and that means people will get stuff wrong. Doesn't matter. I still alienated people. This is why there now 14× as many Ubuntu Server instances on AWS than Red Hat ones. I wonder how many there are of *SUSE compared to Red Hat? Yes, there are people who will, given guidance, learn. But everyone is a beginner at some point, and making things as easy as possible for beginners -- which is what Ubuntu set out to do -- is what wins you users. Secondly, there is a separate problem. If they use computers, people use desktops and laptops. Most of those use Windows. That is, by default, what people know. The problem is that Windows users know nothing about any other OS, but they don't know that. They think that they're skilled expert computer users. So if there are obstacles in their path, they will fall over, and they will unhesitatingly blame the product, not their lack of knowledge. The *only* way to win over such people is to ensure that there are no problems in their path. That everything works as they expect. That means giving them a Windows-like desktop and making sure everything just works out of the box. That's just how it is, IMHO and in my experience. But yours appears to be different. So I think it's time to stop trying to persuade anyone to my side. -- Liam Proven - Technical Writer, SUSE Linux s.r.o. Corso II, Křižíkova 148/34, 186-00 Praha 8 - Karlín, Czechia Email: lproven@suse.com - Office telephone: +420 284 241 084 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org