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documentation problems

Well you could have a point over there. Documentation is not always in line with userlevel. It is either too advanced or too simple. And the document covering what you exactly want to archieve is pretty rare. But how many doc's would there need to be? You've this problem, another person wants it slightly different; different possibility's are pretty large.

Feedback is important; file a bug report when necessary; email improvements to the maker of an howto if you've encountered problems he/she hasn't described. Or make an howto yourself if none are sufficient.

Look at it this way: you write an howto of about 20 pages and you get back a whole OS with millions lines of code. Copied according to some, created according to others.

Most of the time "shortcuts" to archieve something only results in more frustation at some point in the (near) future (when you want basically the same but just a little different). If people spent time to understand underlying technology (and most people never will, I agree) then those will find out that a lot of things are easier to solve then they ever believed at first sight. Things that are not that easy, they understand why and learn to live with it. But with free software, you never have to wait until somebody else solves the problem for you. Waiting then just is a voluntary option.

I've not looked at thunderbird since version 0.2 (about half a year ago or so); I've decided then that it wasn't really good enough to statisfy my needs. I just saw they were at version 0.5 already, so I do expect it has improved considerably.

For email I'm using evolution myself and I cannot think of some feature I want an email application to have, which is missing.

As far as slowed adaption to opensource due to lack of documention, would you be able to make changes to the microsoft equivalent that easy?

A lot of users switching to free software seem to get the feeling of being in control over their computer again. In some ways that's true, but you cannot have full control over a computer without knowing about it's inner workings. I trashed windows since her '98 nightmare. I do know windows has improved a lot, but I've no need for it anymore.

For most things people want to do with a computer it boils down to, install with a graphical wizard and follow all the menus the application you want to work with provides. I don't know if there's a point in writing books about that. When people start looking "under the hood" it's a different story. But with a proprietary linux counterpart that option just isn't available, so how can it slow adoption? All hours spent in learning how something might work will pay itself back someday, either in money or statisfaction.

I've never really cared if m$ will survive or not, I do care that free software continus to statisfy my computing needs.

Most encountered when (Desktop) users switch are in my opinion:
- lack of hardware support, it has improved, but there still is a lot of crap out there which natively doesn't work with a gnu/linux OS.
- loss of data due to incompatible formats of applications used.
- a specific niche application which a user really needs but hasn't a grown up gnu counterpart yet.

Maybe lack of documentation is for some a reason not to switch over, most people won't take it into consideration I think. How many people buy and read a book about how ms outlook works? When people need docs, they might have problems finding them but if someone knows www.tldp.org and www.google.com then the docs available will be found. I think there's more userdocumentation available for gnu/linux than for windows. But it's just an opinion.

Most people want an OS which just works out of the box, gnu/linux not always does that the way you want it. Windows does, but I don't blame the penguin for it; tux came to me without any guarantees and I do see the additional advantages tux gives me. Except for being Free, stability and flexibility are amongst those.

Posted by: guido_z   Posted on: 02/16/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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