Why newbies don't RTFM... 4742

He can take his choice of life's various types of unfairnesses: He-she can, alternatively...

(1) Run MS-Windows, deal with horrendous security nightmares and data lossage, deal with being under the thumb of a malign monopolist, pay through the nose, and not perceive a problem of "the burden of system maintenance" solely because a huge range of problems are perceived as inherent and not fixable through maintenance.

(2) Run MacOS X, deal with considerably greater initial expense, deal with slightly-but-not-too-much-forced occasionally outlays for major upgrades, deal with being somewhat under the thumb of an only mildly malign would-be monopolist, and not perceive a problem of "the burden of system maintenance" not because it's not present but rather because your attention is continually diverted from it by new toys. (E.g., since time immemorial, the "administration" applied by MacOS users to suddenly running out of drive space is to requisition a bigger drive. And who

(3) Run some Linux distribution, have so much freedom and autonomy than many people are made horriby confused and anxious contemplating it, probably save a huge pile of money over the years, and have almost nil "burden of system maintenance" unless he-she runs a badly designed distribution, runs an obsolete-unsupported distribution, and-or insists on using crappo hardware.

That's a terribly disagreeable, terribly unfair menu of choices, I'll admit. Reality sucks. And I haven't even gotten into the bit about rest and taxes.

The spare-time student might actually find option #3 the cheapest, on balance -- except of course that he can cut costs on the other two

Disparagement is indeed regrettable, so I do applaud your intentions.

Some of us involved in Linux documentation have tended to get a little cynical over requests for documentation "tweaks". E.g., some folks say they haven't been getting enough documentation. To which I said:

Moen's Law of Documentation: "The more you write, the less they read."

Although any piece of writing can be improved, even the best examples, especially of technical writing, no matter how excellent, will garner requests for more detail far past the point of reason. Why? Because, most often, a questioner's immediate reaction (to not instantly understanding) is to claim that insufficient information was provided, whether such is true or not. The longer and more detailed any subsequent, further explanations are, the more difficulty target readers will have in finding what they need, and the more they'll demand an even thicker forest of explanations to get lost in.

Thus, greater conciseness often does much more good than do longer & more detailed explanations. Or, what might be needed is better indexing, or following the clbuttic journalist's inverted pyramid answer long answer format I often use -- or just a polite suggestion to Read The Friendly Manual.

Naturally, there is a place for more-accessible documentation -- but there might just be a need for people to have better access to what already exists.

There are entire projects devoted to that already, e.g., the "Newbieized for those (to digress slightly, for a moment), for several reasons:

1. The term "newbie" has always struck me as revoltingly condescending and cloying. Sorry, we can do better than that -- and, in fact, we have: new user, newcomer.

2. The mindset behind the NHFs tends to be equally condescending and cloying: The notion that you have to leaven information with aw-shucks wording lest people be "intimidated" is a disservice to all newcomers, and I'm glad the people who helped me in my day had too much respect for me to do that.

3. Their idea of being "newbie-friendly" often translates to being distribution- and version-specific -- with the result that they help a handful of people and mislead everyone else.

and:

4. I'll be damned if I'll offer people documentation with advertising on it.

But there are other projects. I don't really know them off the top of my head: My main aim as a member of the volunteer Linux community is to buttist others who aspire to be technically knowledgeable and competent -- in part to repay the debt I owe for help given to me, and in part to build the process of collective knowledge among such users, going forward into the future.

If someone says to me "I don't want to understand what I'm doing; I only want to know foo", then I can sympathise with that, but there are other people I'd rather buttist in the limited amount of time I have for entirely volunteer activity. (I'd rather help people who I expect will make meaningful contributions to the technical community in the future.)

So, other people can probably help you find those other projects: I'm just explaining why I don't know their names off the top of my head. My best wishes, and my sincere thanks for your benevolence.

-- Cheers, My pid is Inigo Montoya. You kill -9 Rick Moen my parent process. Prepare to vi.