What's the most common complaint I've heard about Linux?
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What's the most common complaint I've heard about Linux?Not the installation process.
Not finding a distro.
Not getting programs to work.
Not troubleshooting.
Not hardware compatibility.The most common complaint about Linux I've seen is this:
For a normal computer user, asking for help is just about impossible.They ask a simple question and:
People respond "Did you Google it?"
People complain that the question wasn't asked "correctly".
People respond "RTFM"
People get mad??? at them for making an easy mistake.We can't expect normal people to know to, or even know how to deal with any of that stuff.
Search engines these days are awful, manuals are hard to read for most people (especially stuff like ArchWiki), and normal people make mistakes we think are easily avoidable.
The solution to making Linux more popular is not ruthless promotion. The solution is to actually help the people who are trying to use it.
@Linux_in_a_Bit you’re absolutely right, but the issue is on both sides. There’s a massive culture issue in tech where people are expected to magically know everything, and I think power users can mitigate it in part by being open about what we *don’t* know. The other issue is that volunteers have limited time, so new users do need to try google searching first and try RTFM first. They should be saying “I googled and read the manual and found these things, which I don’t understand. Please explain them to me.” And then power users need to politely explain things *without calling them stupid.*
I wrote a decent bit about this in my blog post Linux for Mere Mortals. https://sudo-nano.github.io/posts/Linux-for-Mere-Mortals/
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@petros If you got started in 1993, and kept using it the whole time, then you were acquiring skills at the same rate as the RTFM jerks the post was about, and therefore, were never the object of the jerks' ire in the first place. So, your experience isn't at all representative for even people who got started in the 2000s, much less people who are getting started today.
Maybe you should read the other replies and believe what relatively-newer users are saying.
I did not stop to be part of the community, so I did not stop to hear and to listen.
Just ignore me, my experience does not count
Anyway, I made the effort to read through the answers, and, that's a mix of everything.
There is a German saying which translates roughly as: When you shout in the woods, it's your echo that you hear.
Have a good day.
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What's the most common complaint I've heard about Linux?
Not the installation process.
Not finding a distro.
Not getting programs to work.
Not troubleshooting.
Not hardware compatibility.The most common complaint about Linux I've seen is this:
For a normal computer user, asking for help is just about impossible.They ask a simple question and:
People respond "Did you Google it?"
People complain that the question wasn't asked "correctly".
People respond "RTFM"
People get mad??? at them for making an easy mistake.We can't expect normal people to know to, or even know how to deal with any of that stuff.
Search engines these days are awful, manuals are hard to read for most people (especially stuff like ArchWiki), and normal people make mistakes we think are easily avoidable.
The solution to making Linux more popular is not ruthless promotion. The solution is to actually help the people who are trying to use it.
@Linux_in_a_Bit I thought that #UbuntuLinux did quite a good job in doing that, no?
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I did not stop to be part of the community, so I did not stop to hear and to listen.
Just ignore me, my experience does not count
Anyway, I made the effort to read through the answers, and, that's a mix of everything.
There is a German saying which translates roughly as: When you shout in the woods, it's your echo that you hear.
Have a good day.
@petros Thank you for listening
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What's the most common complaint I've heard about Linux?
Not the installation process.
Not finding a distro.
Not getting programs to work.
Not troubleshooting.
Not hardware compatibility.The most common complaint about Linux I've seen is this:
For a normal computer user, asking for help is just about impossible.They ask a simple question and:
People respond "Did you Google it?"
People complain that the question wasn't asked "correctly".
People respond "RTFM"
People get mad??? at them for making an easy mistake.We can't expect normal people to know to, or even know how to deal with any of that stuff.
Search engines these days are awful, manuals are hard to read for most people (especially stuff like ArchWiki), and normal people make mistakes we think are easily avoidable.
The solution to making Linux more popular is not ruthless promotion. The solution is to actually help the people who are trying to use it.
@Linux_in_a_Bit Yeah, having friends who are linux nerds who will help me pretty much entirely changed my Linux experience
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Who are normal computer users? This is a genuine question. Don't forget that non-normal computer users don't magically know the answers to all your questions. They search, read the ArchWiki, and draw on past experiences.
#linux
Vaguely related; Microsoft pays help desk (or, okay, used to). And for decades most people learned Windows somewhere with paid support of some kind - schools, enterprise contracts.
And it doesn’t FOSS the same way the software does because teaching people doesn’t copy for free. Software’s like a tune, those always spread almost on their own. User education is like learning to play an instrument, that’s just as hard now as it was a hundred years ago.
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What's the most common complaint I've heard about Linux?
Not the installation process.
Not finding a distro.
Not getting programs to work.
Not troubleshooting.
Not hardware compatibility.The most common complaint about Linux I've seen is this:
For a normal computer user, asking for help is just about impossible.They ask a simple question and:
People respond "Did you Google it?"
People complain that the question wasn't asked "correctly".
People respond "RTFM"
People get mad??? at them for making an easy mistake.We can't expect normal people to know to, or even know how to deal with any of that stuff.
Search engines these days are awful, manuals are hard to read for most people (especially stuff like ArchWiki), and normal people make mistakes we think are easily avoidable.
The solution to making Linux more popular is not ruthless promotion. The solution is to actually help the people who are trying to use it.
After years of using Linux, the main problem is, each solution need to be done in a terminal.
You can't avoid typing command in a terminal. And it's an accessibility problem, if you can't solve without it, you failed at bringing Linux to noobs.
On windows, lot of users don't know there is a terminal.
FYI, I'm in IT since ICQ.
BTW, I won't argue here, cause you know Linux fan boys (not you). -
What's the most common complaint I've heard about Linux?
Not the installation process.
Not finding a distro.
Not getting programs to work.
Not troubleshooting.
Not hardware compatibility.The most common complaint about Linux I've seen is this:
For a normal computer user, asking for help is just about impossible.They ask a simple question and:
People respond "Did you Google it?"
People complain that the question wasn't asked "correctly".
People respond "RTFM"
People get mad??? at them for making an easy mistake.We can't expect normal people to know to, or even know how to deal with any of that stuff.
Search engines these days are awful, manuals are hard to read for most people (especially stuff like ArchWiki), and normal people make mistakes we think are easily avoidable.
The solution to making Linux more popular is not ruthless promotion. The solution is to actually help the people who are trying to use it.
@Linux_in_a_Bit I've always done my best to help people become able to help themselves. Show them how to find the information they need, how to search for it. Walk them through applying that information, being there to hold their hand but not lead. Never insult, never put them down.
I've had multiple of them come back to me later because other people were assholes when they just needed a clear answer.
And that's just not right.
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What's the most common complaint I've heard about Linux?
Not the installation process.
Not finding a distro.
Not getting programs to work.
Not troubleshooting.
Not hardware compatibility.The most common complaint about Linux I've seen is this:
For a normal computer user, asking for help is just about impossible.They ask a simple question and:
People respond "Did you Google it?"
People complain that the question wasn't asked "correctly".
People respond "RTFM"
People get mad??? at them for making an easy mistake.We can't expect normal people to know to, or even know how to deal with any of that stuff.
Search engines these days are awful, manuals are hard to read for most people (especially stuff like ArchWiki), and normal people make mistakes we think are easily avoidable.
The solution to making Linux more popular is not ruthless promotion. The solution is to actually help the people who are trying to use it.
@Linux_in_a_Bit This, 100%. Some help forums are absolutely toxic to new users.
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@deathkitten @CedC go for it, the notion that an LLM has an internal representation of *anything* is, um, crackpot at best tbh
@pikesley @CedC @deathkitten LLM are somewhat essentialization engines, they learns characteristics of what they must reproduce. Those "summarized" characteristics are embodied in embeddings. It is possible to a certain extent to see that as what the LLM "knows".
When you have trained your model, embeddings alone can be valuable as "knowledge" -
@manuelcaeiro @Linux_in_a_Bit some people just are ""stupid"" though? If I had to just read the manual and that was my only option to use Linux, I'd still be suffering on Windows. People you might consider "stupid" deserve access to free tech too, because liberation shouldn't be reserved for people with a certain amount of "intelligence" or any other white supremacist made up trait (or any real trait either, other than being alive)
@raphaelmorgan @Linux_in_a_Bit
Do you understand English?
My sentence reads "Lower the standards as if people is stupid is a bad thing...", which means exactly the opposite.note: if you intend to address me again with false allegations, please don't, because it will the last time you'll do it.
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@raphaelmorgan @Linux_in_a_Bit
Do you understand English?
My sentence reads "Lower the standards as if people is stupid is a bad thing...", which means exactly the opposite.note: if you intend to address me again with false allegations, please don't, because it will the last time you'll do it.
@manuelcaeiro @Linux_in_a_Bit my point is that some of us need those "lower standards". If someone not being able to RTFM and successfully search for everything we need to know makes us stupid, I am stupid and I need us to lower standards as if I am stupid
And allowing only people who aren't "stupid" to use a thing is ableist -
@clovis @deathkitten @pikesley
Agreed, but I find it more impressive for a machine to “think” or getting close to it that being a know-it-all with a lot of embedding -
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