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Two Years Before the Prompt: A Linux Odyssey
tim1980 writes "Derek Croxton has written a rather long editorial on how he sees the Linux and Open Source communities, and his personal experiences with Linux, the editorial is titled Two Years Before the Prompt: A Linux Odyssey and is over 3,500 words. Excerpt: 'A novice's greatest fear is sitting in front of a motionless command prompt with no idea what to type; or, as so frequently happens, knowing a command that he copied verbatim from a document discovered on the internet somewhere, but with no idea of what it means or how to alter it if it doesn't behave exactly as advertised.'"
If version 4 breaks version 3's apps, why would they give it the same filename? that doesn't sound like the nice thing to do.
$command -h
$command --help
man $command
info $command
http://www.google.com/search?q=$command
use brain;
"Obscenity is the crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker." - cloak42
this is when you know what command to use. If you don't?
...
and even if you know the command: man man
man, version 1.5k
usage: man [-adfhktwW] [section] [-M path] [-P pager] [-S list]
[-m system] [-p string] name
uau... much better now
Admit it: cli is not for joe average that only needs to change its pc configuration once in a decade. Even if he learns something, he will forget everything in a couple of months
Now wouldn't it be nice if a standard were made and users could be assured that, for the most part, regardless of what distribution they're using:
Of course, every time I bring up the idea of standardizing important parts of Linux distributions the lynch mob comes after me, because consistency and distribution-neutral package installation goes against the spirit of Open Source or something ("stifles choice", I've heard).
I mean, wouldn't it be nice to tell someone "just use apt-get and do X, Y, and Z" instead of "[Install Debian] and use apt-get to do X, Y, and Z"?
But once you're set up, you're set up for good. You can't afford to "waste a whole day", but it's not like you are going to have to "waste a whole day" every day, just once. It is called "learning".
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I have a hard time with man - yes, it's full-on documentation, but 19 times out of 20, I don't need the 15 highly obscure switches for a command, I just need the command in its simplest form.
What man is missing is an example section, e.g., "To find all files with mary in the title, use ls -R *mary*" or whatever; "to find all files modified in the last 10 days do..."
I will say right out that perhaps such a facility exists, but I am unaware. I am a GUI user of Linux (SuSE 9.1 X86_64) and my command line skills have rusted since I lived in VMS 20 years ago...
Now, perhaps the author has inadvertantly drawn attention to the heart of Linux's adoption woes: documentation. Why doesn't this author know about apt-get? Why doesn't he know about urpmi? Why isn't he aware of the vast amount of documentation normally available in /usr/share/docs/ ?
The common answers people receive for this are:
But to even adept computer users (not uber geeks, just adept) the location of "the manual" isn't obvious, they don't know about */docs and, lets face it, man pages are written FGBG (for geeks, by geeks).
In comparison to it's top two competitors, linux is the only OS to date where a user is expected to magically know the location of appropriate documentation, by default have a degree in the documentation jargon of advanced coders, and to be willing to read a small novel on the intricacies of his particular distro's package and system management methods to even use the os to any degree of efficiency.
This is what people mean when they say Linux isn't ready *yet* and to tie it back to the article, these are exactly the sort of apparently groundless complaints that surface as a result of this gaping hole in useability.
think that next time he RTFM ...
/root/.
Or he will just give up on Linux and stick to Windows. Because all Linux users are a bunch of Jirks anyways. I see RTFM. that is the most useless sort of help anyone can give. How about at least poining them to the correct spot in the manual. A lot of times the reason nubes have so much problems with the manual is that they don't have the proper understainging of the way things work so while their brains are trying to make sence of all these forgen commands "rm" "Redo Mount", "Revese memory", "release mount" "remove" then you mix a buch of forgen symboles to the mix \ / ? * . They never seen these things before. So the rm -rf / could logicaly mean to someone who has never seen the command "Restore Machiene" with options Remove Files and the / could mean something about temp files. Who knows if you didn't know that / is your root directory heck when I was a newbee when they told me go to my root directory I did a cd
If you were not able to help him redirect him to a better channel more targeted towards noobies. because doing crap like that only makes them more fustrated and dislike linux.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
From experience, most help comes from stringing together incomprehensible usenet posts and articles found on google
:) (I don't know if this smiley is appropriate at this point though).
:)
That's sad, and very if I may add.
When I started on linux (slack, then redhat at that time, it took me a few years to land and stick to debian) so when started most of help came from friends who begun earlier and they gave me lots of help and guidence which convinced me even further that linux didn't just come with a style that I loved from the first day, but also with a bunch'a helping fellas and a great community.
And this (fortunately) followed me since then. At times when I had to discover stuff by myself were challenging, but I always enjoyed every bit of it from making hardware work to scripting exotics and on.
I guess not all you out there were so lucky
But linux wasn't started to be a lame-proof clicking gui for solitaire playing illiterates. That's a fact. Since then very very very many people got computers and many of them think they are gurus, which they aren't, but at least they complain all the way about things they find hard to be accustomed to.
Like command line interfaces. Which in linux is a gift from god. Hell it _is_ linux. What "they" wish to click upon all the time are just a covering cloth, which many of out there like too, but know that it wasn't what made linux strong (using past tense because nowadays that is changing to a very good direction). It can bring more users (as it does), but hopefully they will seee the great benefits also which lay behind the eyecandy and which is the real and main advantage of linux and co.
There's one thing I always tell and I feel I can't repeat it enough times: don't like it, don't use it, choose something else, because you can (!) which is a very good thing.
That's all folks, keep linux
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
The problem with the apt-get approach is that it's like living in a town with only one supermarket. OK, so it's a really big supermarket but still:
- If you can't find the food you want in there, you're stuck
- If you can but it's stale, damaged or out of stock, you're stuck
- You are totally dependent on the people running the supermarket
- The larger a supermarket is, the harder it becomes to find things in it. Just imagine taking your grandma to a supermarket where the aisles stretched as far as the eye could see!
To stretch the analogy a bit further than it can really go, just imagine if getting tired of this one supermarket you travelled to the next town and bought a lampshade from a shop there. Bring it all the way back, put it in your house and suddenly your TV explodes.
What happened? "Oh, you mixed different repositories". All centralised systems suffer this but Fedora worse than most - you're fine as long as you stick to the core repositories but if you add others (and you do need to do that, if you want a big enough collection to be useful) things will randomly break due to "conflicts". Just imagine trying to explain that to grandma!
Oh yeah. There are a bunch of other problems as well. I've seen a lot of 3rd party packages of software that are totally broken. Often the users don't connect the problems they are seeing with the packages. This happens a lot with complex software like Wine, Mono etc ... I've seen quite a few packages of Wine that won't even start! It's pretty clear that many 3rd party packagers hardly test what they produce at all, especially in the case of "new release, I'll just bump the number in the spec and rebuild". I'd estimate that about 40-50% of the tech support problems I deal with in Wine are due to incorrectly built packages. It's not even hard! Just configure, make, make install but people still cock it up mightily - using badly done wrapper scripts and moving files around from where they're supposed to be are the most common, but bad builds happen too.
Apt-get has other problems. You have to duplicate this huge effort over and over again for each distro. This doesn't happen so you get vendor lockin - the very thing we're trying to all get away from, no? I've met more than one person in my life whos number 1 reason for using Debian was "I can apt get lots of software". It was not due to the merits of the distribution itself, it was not due to have a nice installer, slick default desktop, solid PAM setup etc etc. It was because installing software was not a pain in the ass.
Apt-get works great as long as you are willing to throw infinite manpower at the problem. We don't have infinite manpower, duh. So centralised packaging cannot be a scalable, sustainable way forward for our community outside of certain use cases like servers (where it works well).
I remember sitting in front of a DEC or UNIX machine when I was younger a not knowing at all what to do. I had teachers to help me, and books to learn, so I am not so afraid anymore. I remember sitting in front of the first mac confused. I looked stuff up, and used prior experience, and figured it out.
My mom OTHOH gets confused when the GUI rules change slightly. She has no basis on which to explore such machines. Frankly the complexity of Windows is just overwhenliming. It might be better to give her a list of command line instructions. The things done would be much less fancy, but at least she would get them done.
A lot got done with training in the linear-text-mode-driven world. I do think GUI let more poeple use computer, as well as justifing faster more expensive machines. I mostly work on a GUI. I do think, however, that one of the great fallacies of our time is that a GUI is all that is needed to get a user computerized. Just look at how much money is quoted for training when switching a user from one GUI to another, even if both are renditions of MS Windows.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Look, if you're ranting in this vein, it's because you haven't yet become comfortable with Linux in general (to subvert your term) to the point where you understand the bigger picture. I could whine all day about the various and sundry differences between Windows versions too...but most folks would find it silly, because we've all got a decade or more of Windows in general experience, so the fact that "Dialup Networking" might be found in 3 different places over the years seems quite trivial. And it is. But what you don't recognize is that to someone who has a good working understanding of and familiarity with Linux in general the differences between the Mandrake package manager and the Fedora one are pretty much that same level of trivial. And if you aren't scared of the command line, apt-get, emerge, yum, and urpmi all end up seeming roughly equivalent, and it isn't much trouble to use any one of them. To someone who has been running Linux for a few years, picking up a new distro isn't any real challenge. (Well, unless it's Linux from Scratch or something ;-)
My point is that once again, people are viewing Linux through Windows-trained eyes. Computer systems have differences, even within families that are similar. Since pretty much anyone who works with computers at all has years of Windows experience these days, people know how to work around the annoyances, and compensate for the differences. When someone gets thrown into the world of Linux, they tend to try out 6 different distros in 6 months...is it really a surprise that minor differences would seem much more serious when you have so little experience with the family of systems in general?
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
Untarring and ungzipping is a fundamental operation, but it takes something like 30 steps to understand.
Sure, but you can do pretty well by the RTFM method, and using "tar xvzf file.tar.gz" until you discover that you really want to learn what each of those letters means. By then you'll find yourself wanting to use the man pages, because it tells you about all kinds of other nifty stuff you never knew about.
I find all kinds of useful stuff in man pages all the time. Hell, they're oftentimes more useful than all the newbie-friendly documentation on the web. The difference is that each level of information is ideal for a different level of user. Start with web & HowTo docs, then move to less specific HowTo docs, then go to manpages. It's not that hard; it just takes time.
My point is that once again, people are viewing Linux through Windows-trained eyes.
If the goal is to have an OS/distro that will compete with Windows and OSX, then the OS/distro will have to accommodate the millions (or Billions, even) who will view Linux through Windows-trained eyes.
I spent months following wickedly obscure and time consuming instructions for compiling apps for Mandrake before I discovered the magic of the MCC gui for URPMI, then another couple months finding reliable mirrors.
Now, when a new version of my favorite app come out I have to wait until someone comes along to make an rpm for me, but when the same app releases an update for Windows, all I gotta do is download and click Next a few times. I have seriously broken my Mandrake install trying to install software via means other than URPMI, so I have pretty much quit trying.
Don't tell me to RTFM either, because I have R'd several FM's but they don't help much because of the two dozen different ways the authors and the distros deal with installing software. Although I'm a clueless newbie among the slashdot Gnu/Linux elite, the rest of the world thinks I'm some sort of computer genius. I've been fiddling and reading and making and breaking Linux installs for almost four years now and I still get frustrated with the process.
Meanwhile, my main reason for becoming interested in Linux has evaporated--Windows no longer sucks. In fact, WindowsXP is a pretty darned good OS--better than I could have imagined when suffering with the infernal abomination of WindowsME.
I guess I just get tired of the slashdot mindset that appears every time there is a thread that suggests that maybe just maybe there could be some improvements in the area of user-friendliness of Linux distros. It usually starts with, "Just open a terminal window and..."
The more Unix-y and less Windows-ish or Macintoshy the solution, the longer it will be before any distro makes serious inroads among average users.
I'm willing to spend my hobby time fiddling with and learning about my OS because I have enjoy it, but most people are afraid to click anything they haven't been approved to click.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
"Unless of course you're a grandma or a friend of some Linux guy who foisted his preferred distribution upon you because he knows what's best for your computer..."
Those filthy Linux guys. Always corrupting our grandmothers! I hate them. All of them!
"Oh, I'm sure apt is portable enough to run on anything. You're just forgetting that a repository is also necessary, which only exists for the major distributions."
No, I'm not forgetting it.
I'm asking you for SPECIFICS and you keep coming back with hypothetical cases.
Again, someone who CHOOSES that distribution already KNOWS the limitations and has CHOSEN it for some reason.
Even in a world with a Central Authority controlling the naming of files, the naming of packages, the placement of files and the actions of the installer, that would STILL be a problem.
Simply put, why should the additional functionality of your hypothetical distribution be REQUIRED of all distributions in the perfect world you claim needs to exist?
If it is NOT required, then you are right back to where you are today. Conflicts and all.
"Because Linux zealots seem to believe that a little bit of distribution consistency is the worst possible thing that could happen..."
I guess that's your problem.
You are NOT advocating for "a little bit of distribution consistency".
If you can't see that, you're an idiot. That was why I pointed out all the things needed to achieve your fantasy. The Central Authority for naming all files, all versions, all packages, all the contents of packages, and all the behaviours of the installer.
Not to mention the limitations on what kernel patches are required to be applied (and which are forbidden).
"So in other words, your standard works as long as you confine yourself to a single platform? Some standard."
It's called a "defacto standard".
It works. The process works. Linux advances. Users have options.
Under your solution, MANY of those options would be TAKEN AWAY so that some idiot would be sure that every possible package he could find would run on his machine.