Re: Linux is not for consumers!
On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 18:01:44 +0000
Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> wrote:
> > This may be true of some; but even reasonably intelligent users with
> > quite a lot of experience can come unstuck in those areas with which
> > they are not familiar, simply because the documentation is often so
> > poor.
>
> In many cases it will remain poor until people report what they found
> confusing about it - it's sometimes hard to document something you wrote
> in a way that somebody unfamiliar with it can understand.
People do. Their confusion is evident in the posts to mailing lists for
each app. Often questions go unanswered. It may be, of course, that the
documentation people are silently perfecting their document taking these
questions into account, but in the meantime people are confused. This is
not true of all apps. Some are done very well indeed and the developers
interact with users very well. But it is true of enough important areas
(e.g. sound) that the original thesis of this thread is true.
And there are some cases where it's hard to know what to say. What, that's
constructive, does one say about the manpage for gnome-alsamixer
(0.9.3-3)?
- Richard
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