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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.""
My freshman year (2000) in college started with me not knowing what a "linux" was. This all changed when a friend handed me a Debian distribution burned to an ISO. He encouraged me to repartition my hard drive and install this next to my Windows 98 SE installation. Like a lot of new people, I hosed my hard drive. I ended up doing fresh installs on both OS's and getting the dual boot to work. There were cheap little games and some truly great and historical open source software on that disc also. The next day in class, the guy couldn't get me to shut up about how great it was. I had hit a few snags but the answers were all online.
... Where do I get a disc for that?"
My first college kegger could not compare to the first time I ran Linux. Nor would a kegger ever be as memorable. A free operating system? That works?
A year or two later, I'm in a new class. There's a kid sitting in front of me going on and on about Linux. Up to this point, I've used Debian, Mandrake & Red Hat so I drop a question out there:
Me: "I really like Mandrake, what do you think is the best distribution?"
Student A: "It's obviously Gentoo."
Me: "Gentoo? I haven't even heard of that one..."
Student A: "Well, it's clearly the superior distribution."
Ok, so my first encounter with Linux people working against Linux people in a childish d*ck measuring contest. To my horror, I overheard the following conversation thereafter ensue between him and a person in the class looking for a Linux installation experience:
Student B: "I use Windows and I'm confused even as where to start..."
Student A: "That's easy, just install Gentoo."
Student B: "I
Student A: "They're freely online, you just have to find them and install them--I recommend an ftp install so that you get the latest versions of everything. And with Gentoo, you can just emerge whenever you want to update. "
Student B: "'Emerge'--what does that mean?"
Student A: *snorts* "If I have to tell you, there's no point in you even getting Linux."
And on it went, with Student A asserting his superiority. When I got home, I tried to install Gentoo. It took forever, I hit a million snags but eventually got it working. I hated it. After talking again to them, the only reason Student A was using Gentoo was because he had some crazy chipset he needed to compile everything for (a dual AMD setup which was rare back then) and he also revealed that he spent every Sunday night "emerging."
Luckily, I intevened with Mandrake and gave him something close to Windows that an idiot probably could install. I told him all the cautionary advice I had to give and I feel that he most closely identified with me.
The truth is: not all Linux experiences are for everybody.
My work here is dung.
Good call.
God knows how long I put off learning the ins and outs of Linux distros because of the Linux catch-22: Linux sackriders go on about the superiority of Linux and insist that you're still living in the Dark Ages if you're using Windows, yet if you even feign interest in wanting to learn and perhaps getting some guidance from them, they shun you for being a newbie.
Thank God I'm stubborn and like reading enough that I gorged myself on dozens upon dozens of books so as I had a large enough Linux vocabulary to 'fake it' and subsequently was 'accepted' into certain online Linux cliques. I was then 'allowed' to ask questions and thus was no longer 'out of the loop.'
Seriously, if people are so adamant about making other people aware of the advantages of Linux then for crying out loud, help them learn or at the very least, point them in the right direction. Don't smack them upside the head for not knowing. It's one thing to be a Linux pusher, trying to convince Windows users to try out the alternatives, it's another thing to be a Linux snob and to shun people for not-knowing-yet-wanting-to-know.
I personally don't have enough patience to teach too many people about Linux, especially from scratch. So what do I do when someone asks me about it or wants to learn about it? I give them a whole bunch of useful e-books and related reading materal on CD and tell them to start by taking a bite out of that. I also give them a copy of whatever easy distro I have laying around and tell them to install it on a second computer and just 'play' with it. Then if they're still interested, they've got a decent enough foundation for me (ore more likely someone with more patience) to have a crack at enlightening them further.
Are there community awards to award portions of the linux world that do provide outstanding support?
I know of a few people who can attest to the same scenario repeating itself as well. I am scratching my head over a problem I am experiencing. Seems nothing I do will work and nothing I have read to that point addresses the issue I am experiencing. What do I do? I post of a forum. I try to be as detailed as possible. Listing what I've tried and the results I get from it. Listing all the symptoms I have identified until the moment of posting.
No sooner do I post the question than I find the answer myself since I never stopped looking for answers elsewhere. So then I am faced with the question: Should I attempt to retract my posting or should I reply to my own question with the solution? Most of the time, I decide to do the later. Even though it makes me seem like an idiot answering my own question, I am always hopeful that someone else asks the same question but doesn't find the answer on their own.
The forum I frequent most is the Fedora forum and, frankly, I see no evidence of snobbery on there. So I guess perhaps the answer is to direct people to the forums that are most suited to the users with questions. I know from previous experience that the IRC bullies out there use IRC as a means to maintain a level of social dominance and treat channels like territory. Clearly, they have their own issues to sort out and are best left alone.
I agree wholeheartedly with you. I've had my share of "gorilla gurus" who are not above intellectual bullying when someone asks a question.
I am reminded of the attitudes displayed in Ray Bradbury's story "The Other Foot," in which (for those who may not recall) a town full of black people who emigrated to Mars en masse shortly before World War III find out that they will be receiving white refugees. Their immediate impulse is to start putting "Blacks Only" signs on restaurants and hotels, thus re-creating the situation that they had fled years before, only with themselves at the top.
Many of these "gorilla gurus" have most likely been on the receiving end of derision and scorn for not working with Windows, and have also either been given the same treatment when they started learning about Linux. It becomes like the geek version of the stereotypical fraternity, where these people associate poor manners with the rights of the "initiated," and now that they find themselves in a position of relative power are prepared to make those under them pay and pay and pay.
So much for a possible cause. A solution? Perhaps reminding these people that the same attitudes pervaded the Commodore 64 user groups... and where are they now?
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
I had a similar experience, except I don't use IRC chat very often so I don't know the 'invisible rules.' I was trying to get help setting up the IVTV drivers for my Hauppauge card to run MythTV on my computer. The Ubuntu chat room (that the support link goes to) told me to ask in the MythTV chat room. So I did.
First I got yelled at for asking the same question twice in 10 minutes, because it was unanswered. Despite there being something like 250 people listed in the room, NOBODY was chatting whatsoever-- and they yelled at me for asking the same question twice in ten minutes!
Then I got yelled at because this was "the wrong room" to ask questions about setting up hardware. I asked what the right chat room was, and the answer was basically, "I don't know, but not here." Gee, that's helpful... the Ubuntu forums (that the Support menu links to!) told me to come here, and you tell me to go away.
Then I was yelled at because someone in the IRC channel who was trying to help me (which I do appreciate) asked me to paste in the error log. So I did, and I got yelled at by someone else for "spamming" the channel with 8 lines of text. (To remind you, this is a channel with NO conversations going on except mine.) God forbid I paste in 8 lines of text and spam the 248 people sitting in the room and not even talking at all.
I've had equally bad experiences with mailing lists. Look, if I want to answer a specific question, I don't want to have to go through the effort of signing up for the mailing list, whitelisting it in my email client, "confirming" that I actually signed up for the mailing list, posting my question, then waiting for an answer that may or may not come.
Please, PLEASE, use web forums for support. They are far, far superior. They are searchable, they are linkable, they aren't full of 248 people doing absolutely NOTHING except complaining when other people are being helpful.
And whoever runs the IVTV project: What is the point of creating drivers that are so difficult to install that no mortal could possibly do it? What's the point? Why not spend your time counting cracks in the sidewalk, it seems like that would be equally productive.
After my experience with IVTV drivers, including having two different Linux gurus walking me through the process over email, just makes me come to the conclusion that open source has nothing to do with producing usable software, but is instead just a huge circle-jerk for techies so they can pretend they're better than you. Out of the hundreds of people exposed to this problem, only two were actually helpful, and even with the help of those two I never got working IVTV drivers installed.
(And for the record, the Hauppauge card was recommended to me by a MythTV forum, so it's not like I bought some weird-ass hardware from Mars.)
Now I'm a lot more selective:
1) I won't use an open source product unless it's at least version 1.0. All those sub-1.0 projects are the ones that are impossible to install, use, get documentation for, or get help for, and I'm sick of it-- screw it.
2) I won't even bother trying to get support unless there's a support forum. If I have to sign up for a mailing list, I'll just delete it and use something else. If I have to go into a IRC chat room, same.
3) I won't even bother trying to use the product unless the website is actually slightly useful. Firefox, for instance, has a very usable and useful website (until you go to report a bug, but that's another topic), where IVTV has a Wiki with perhaps a total of 500 words worth of documentation.
(FYI, if your Wiki tutorial sucks, nobody's going to come down from heaven and fix it for you for the simple reason that the people confused by the tutorial *don't know* what the correct process is-- if they did, they wouldn't need the Wiki in the first place. It's more efficient for the developer, who knows the process by heart, to spend 10 minutes fixing the Wiki than random Joe on the internet spending 10 days researching how to install the software and fixing it when he's done only to be told by the developer that he did it all wrong. Wikis are as bad as mailing lists and IRC chat rooms.)
Comment of the year
A good example to bad IRC channels is the Wikipedia one. The servers had a major outage today, and the error message said: Visit the IRC channel for more info. So in I go.
It's people basically discussing their sexlives, and the treatment of women in Islam, and if you ask a single question about the foundation servers, you get kicked. Which seems pretty bad to me.
I can understand in non-"official" IRC support channels, but when it's listed officially by the site/distro/software website, it should maintain a friendly, semi-professional image. As it's the first place people trying out Linux or new software might experience. Of course, #n00bsWTF on irc.l33thax0rs.nu can do what the hell they like.
I remember my first days with Linux. I tried man, and I couldn't work out how to quit it, so I Ctrl Z'd it each time. Upon logout, I got the warning about stopped jobs. Little things like that are confusing. vi is confusing. (vim less so). You can scroll up in less, but not in more. Simple things for us are ultra confusing to people that don't know Linux. Think back to the days when you knew nothing about Linux/Unix, and remember them when helping out people in the same boat.
Get your own free personal location tracker
lyapunov wrote:
> Most people want everything handed to them, and if you do not have a self started attitude UNIX is fairly intimidating.
No, my friend. Most people want their computer to work, just like any other appliance.
Most people use cars to get them and their families from point A to point B. Those that supercharge their engines, lower the suspension, etc. are a tiny minority.
Same goes for VCRs, dishwashers, telephones, etc. They are supposed to make our lives simpler by saving us time and allowing us to spend it on things we consider more important.
How is a computer different?
People want to communicate, shop, pay bills and trade online, play games, read news, work, organize their photo albums, balance their budgets and many other things a computer is suitable for. They rarely want to spend huge significant time and effort just to be able to do that.
> I spent another 6 months getting my printer to work.
Your perseverance is commendable but are you sure that it was the best use of a 6 months time?
Someone who has always impressed me as a class act is Wietse Venema. When someone on the Postfix mailing list asks a question that's already answered in the man pages, his response is polite and concise: "The answer to your question can be found in the (postconf|postfix|postsuper) man page". It's a response that is neither insulting nor dismissive, and it shows that Wietse thought about your question long enough to determine which man page has the answer, and maybe even asked himself if the explanation in the man page is sufficient.
Yes, my only tool is a hammer. And you're starting to look like a nail.