Brazilian Linux Users Want Better Documentation

brazilian brain writes "Did you know that users don't like the inclusion of payware bundled with our everyday's "official" Linux distributions? And that they need an User's Guide more than an Install Guide? Linux in Brazil ran a poll for 30 days, asking what users expected from the next editions of their preferred distributions, and discovered these facts - and many more." (Poll results have been translated to English; the rest of the site is in Portugese)

Comments

The opinion of a brazilian

[Karpe]

As a brazilian, I would like to share with you my opinions on the subject.

In Brazil, there was a boom in the media about Linux, specially because of a company called Conectiva wich sells a translated and adapted version of RedHat Linux. This company has grown a lot and fast. Now, you can buy Linux in any bookstore, software shop, etc.

This caused a *lot* of people to start using Linux, which is great, but this people don't have the habit of reading to much.

Conectiva supports 2 mailing lists, ldp-br, lie-br, which discuss and work on translation of HOW-TOs, man pages and on internationalization of software. I subscribe to them, and every now and then there is a guy asking how to configure his modem and such. Sometimes, I think if it really is worthy to translate documentation to these people. But then I wait, and don't think anymore about it, and keep working! :)

To conclude, there are a lot of documentation out there, and these people just don't like to read. They don't like to translate also. They expect that a big company will guide them by the hand.

As a friend of mine says, when someone switches from Windows to Linux, they are switching from a slingshot to a canon. And a canon can be very nasty if yu don't know how to handle it.