Linux Snobs, The Real Barriers to Entry

McSnarf writes "It's not Windows. It's not distro wars. Sometimes it's just the arrogant attitude that keeps people from switching from Windows. 'As I spoke to newbies, one Windows user who wanted to learn about Linux shared the encouraging and constructive note (not) he received from one of the project members. The responding note read: "Hi jackass, RTFM and stop wasting our time trying to help you children learn.""

Comments

Re:RTFM!

[Theatetus]

For example, say I want to learn how to do something using the command line. Googling a phrase that describes what I want to do rarely yields optimal results. Since I don't know what the command is, I can't type "man thing I want to do".

Read man's man page some time. the -k option is like the apropos command (another thing you should look into), it searches for the word you supply in the title and description of all the manual pages. So man -k format shows you all the pages that have the word "format" in their title or short description. If that still doesn't show you what you need, man -K "some arbitrary string" does a full-text search of the entire manual for "some arbitrary string".

I'm not ragging you for this or anything, I'm just amazed at how few people actually read man's man page.

Re:Linux sNOBs

[cayenne8]

"As far as mailman on Debian is concerned a person who has..."

I've not personally tried Debian, but, I have heard the community there isn't exactly 'newbie friendly'.

I've tried RH back in the day, and Slackware was my first Linux try, back in the early 90's. I've found so far, the most friendly to newbs distro, is probably Gentoo. The forums are a great place to look for info, and also easy to get even easy questions answered. The community seems pretty tolerant of questions that 'have been asked before'.

I've never had much a problem finding help with any distro I've tried in the past tho...but, then again, I learned early on, to start a USENET post with something like "OK, I've tried, this, this, this and this...and am still stuck, does anyone have any links or suggestions?" Just to show that I've tried on my own and am now stuck. That usually got a good response. I also used to be more active in USENET groups....if people see you posting to help others, they'd more likely be willing to help you.

UNIX once was a revolt against snobbery

[Latent Heat]

I believe that the issue isn't Linux for FOSS as such but a lot of the culture and history behind UNIX. UNIX of course was as commercial a product as anything else, but Torvald, Stallman, and the rest of the FOSS community decided on patterning their offering after UNIX and hence inherited a lot of the cultural legacy.

UNIX was in a way a revolt against the snobbery of the mainframe culture. UNIX was named in contrast with MULTICS -- MULTICS was this massive time-sharing mainframe OS coming out of MIT which was supposed to have all kinds of whizbang security and protection features. UNIX was to be the single-user (at least initially) "personal" counterpart to the time-sharing Borg hive of MULTICS. UNIX ran on a PDP 11 minicomputer while MULTICS required a ponderous Burroughs mainframe.

The MS-DOS PC along with the Windows follow-on was a revolt against UNIX. UNIX had become the OS of choice for VAXen and had become the ossified mainframe OS of its day against which the PC was the revolt.

I don't think you will have people who are complete noobs having any issues with a *nix -- people are perfectly happy with OS-X. The people you will have trouble with are the people who cut their teeth on DOS and later Windows, who have memories of what they went through in the VAX days, and any hint of inadvertent condensension from Linux gurus is enough to give them flashbacks of their old tormenters.

Re:Linux Snobs / Tech Snobs

[belg4mit]

Indeed, see also ESR's How To Ask Questions The Smart Way