-----Original Message----- From: Anders Johansson [mailto:andjoh@rydsbo.net]

[...]

Most people won't have a clue what "libgtk+" is or if it's ok to remove it. If you tell them "it's the basic library for the Gimp ToolKit" they won't be helped a great deal. Even if they should know what Gimp is most of them won't know what a library is, or what Gimp has to do with, for instance, nautilus. It's just too much knowledge to require from a complete newbie.

Er... yeah. Why in the world would/should it even occur to a person that they need the Gimp in order to run their file-viewer/browser? Of course, AFTER they break something, they'll hear all about it. Somebody on the list will be shaking his head about "how could these friggin', clueless newbies NOT immediately assume that a desktop/web browser MUST absolutely have a Photoshop-equivalent application in order to work??" On that note, I originally bought SuSE because it had *so* much software. I don't remember seeing the part where they said: "At least half of this stuff will not work with the other half. You can't try out two similar programs, side-by-side, because the system will break if you load them both at once."

...

If they aren't sure that these things should be removed then n is the right answer until they know what it is that's going on. *shrug*

Which is likely to be never for most people.

Well, did you and Ben really, really, actually sit down with the manuals (and man pages and HowTos (except they didn't exist in those days) and Infos (ditto) and read them through -- all of them, about every possible part of the system, and every possible interaction -- and only THEN start configuring and using? I'm thinking that the answer would be "no". I made the mistake of not wasting too much of our Linux guru's time, when we had a Linux guru. But he left. There are a few people here who code things for Linux -- well, actually they port stuff -- but when it comes to the user interface and making everyday applications work... they know less than I do. (Everybody who's about to make a smart-ass comment can just consider it made, ok? :-) Of course, when that Linux guru *was* here, he did almost everything from the command line, and when I went to him with problems (like printing, mail, network stuff, etc., etc.) he would *invariably* grin and say "So use Red Hat". I was stubborn, and wanted to understand enough to make it work with SuSE, instead. He said he admired my tenacity, if not my good sense... and then he'd tell me again how Red Hat just "worked right out of the box" for whatever was ailing me at the time. /kevin