-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
I get quite a few mails with similar subject lines or expressed in a similar tone in my professional capacity here at SuSE's London office. And these are usually on topics that go well beyond SuSE's free installation support (and anyway installation support is not my job).
And, I'm sorry to say that although I reply to them all very politely (and I hope helpfully), I do find the implied tone which says "Help me or else I stop using Linux" rather irritating.
There is a learning curve which you have to go through, and which I had to go through also.
And Linux is getting easier and easier to use because of the massive work which a huge number of people (many of them unpaid as well as those employed by the distributions) have done to help you.
Well, I completely understand your sentiments. I think there is this perception that since Linux and it distributors a few years ago were struggling to get Linux past the "it doesn't support much hardware" and "there aren't very many apps" to "Linux is for geeks and pros and not user friendly". Well, I can assure you it is. I joined this group a couple three years ago. I was a relative novice to Linux. Had started on Corel deb, dumped that for Mandrake 71 and spent about a year with that. I decided to pick up SuSE when the 2.4 kernel came out. I have to say that the style that SuSE has been using and perfecting is by far very user friendly. I have a better time installing and setting up SuSE Linux than W98 and XP. I think the thing that we see when we see these "help me or else" posts is two things. A) Many people come from a Windows mind set and in that Help from M$ is relegated to "if you have a problem either reboot, or go to safe mode - then reboot, or the ever popular "reinstall Windows" advice. So, this tend to put people in the mind frame of having to fight and expect hostility and condesention as part of the OS experience. And B) People assume that since the perception of Linux being a Geek system that they will be confronted by an arrogant crowd of systems admins and gurus and therefore take the stance of hostility based on this assumption. The fact of the matter it that about one year after joining this list I was offering advice to serveral "system admins" on how to do work arounds for the Xserver and Nvidia. Last year, to my surprise, I found that one of the most knowledgible people on the list took one of my emails I wrote to help someone set up Wine and put it in the unofficial SuSE FAQ. So, my point? It's simple. If you want to use Linux your going to have to take part in a community. If you come on like a bull in a china shop you'll be labelled a troll and ignored. But if your really trying to find out and learn a different way of using your computer than you have to accept the fact that a learning curve is enevitable and that your going to have to ask questions. A person that does this soon learns that this is probably the most user friendly group they're likely to find. I have made serveral on line friends that I trust and know will help, not only myself but other, It's also a little like a pecking order. Many of the relatively new user will get help from those such as myself, and then I in turn get "tutoring" from the more experienced and so forth. SuSE is committed to make Linux very user friendly. So much so that I hear rumors that they include non-programmers and IT/admin people to test the OS before it's released in order to get the perspective of the everyday common end-user. But then again, it's only a rumor! ;-) Cheers, Curtis. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.7 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+aGWW7WVLiDrqeksRAqO9AJ430rYnPRAccVfKns8dOnYFx5cNIgCgjyen +3BUwD7FCXtJAJ0Rg+EoYGg= =IRTS -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----