fcmartins wrote:
James, I fully share your viewpoint, but I have to disagree with the use of the word "idiots"
I will chime in as an idiot who often has to come to the list to beg for
ideas to fix problems that, to those with the knowledge, are trivial.
When it comes down to it, I am an end user. I use my computer for basic
things - email, web browsing, TV shows, music, and video games. Those
are the same things I used Windows for. I never did anything in Windows
that made me have to learn about the actual software workings of the
computer and when something doesn't work in Linux I have absolutely no
frame of reference to fall back on or compare things to in order to fix
the problem. People say 'regedit is the same as in Windows' but that
doesn't help someone who never used it there. :)
Then once the problem is fixed it all works great until I update
something. I may need the same fix after the update as I had used
before, but it's several months later and I no longer remember anything
about what to do, so I have to ask again. The forum has been a huge help
with this since I can now go there and search for the old fix but it
does still happen for questions asked pre-forum.
the users might just be ignorant
This is often the case, even for those of us who try the db, google, and
other forums for answers before asking for help. Often times we find
just enough information to tell us what the problem is, but not enough
to tell us how to fix it. To quote man_in_shack's earlier post:
"Then either the instructions are flawed or the user is beyond hope."
I run into flawed instructions very often as a newbie. Okay, flawed may
not be the correct term, maybe 'not specific enough'. Sometimes a fix
will say "edit Y file and add Z", but I don't know how to find Y file
and when I do find it I don't know what part of the many lines in it to
add Z to. I have often broken my computer trying to follow directions
that were just shy of specific enough for an uneducated (in computers)
user. When I find someone who knows more than I to help me fix it they
ask why the heck I did something so stupid and the answer usually is
that I didn't know better.
Searches often fail because I know what I need to find, but may not know
the best key words to search for, so I end up spending an hour reading
through stuff I don't need and grabbing terms from those pages to refine
my search enough that I can hopefully get to what I do need. By the time
I give up and post for help I am so confused that I'm not even sure how
to word what I need anymore.
The above quote was referring to regedit. For me the Useful Registry
Keys instructions took about thirty minutes of google searches and
webpage reading before I could even start following them. Most of the
time was going through the pages to find one in dummy speak to tell me
what regedit even was so I could figure out if I needed to try it. Then
trying to learn enough to know what keys in the list I should try.
This has also been improved as more detailed instructions are added to
the wiki, hopefully that continues. I live in dread of having to update
my wine again, my currently stable install is from a wine-git that took
me 3 days of tears and caffeine to figure out and even with the notes I
took along the way and I know that I can not repeat the steps without help.
Idiots may be a bit harsh, but I can't say it's always wrong either.
Particularly when used by someone who spends a great deal of time saying
the same things over and over as each new person runs into a problem
that needs the same fix someone else needed last week. Even though I
know the people who cut me off on the highway each day aren't all
idiots, I still call them all that after it happens enough times. :)
