Re: Documentation and Usability
Anonymous coward <jah.pigeon@ukonline.co.uk> writes:
>On Sat, Jan 17, 2004 at 07:01:03PM -0500, Roberto Sanchez wrote:
>>John Hasler wrote:
>>>Kevin Mark writes:
>>>
>>>>compare what you get from the windows world. no community. no
>>>>help. need to buy $$$ books. pay $$$$ for tech support.
>>
>>This is an outright falsehood. There are just as many, if not more,
>>MS Windows oriented user groups/communities as there are for
>>GNU/Linux. Granted, tech support is still expensive.
>
>But the "visible output" from the Windoze communities is of much lower
>quality. Googling for an answer to some Windoze problem rarely turns up
>much in the way of a useful result. With Linux, you tend to get more
>results than you can shake a stick at...
This seems to be partly due to the nature of issues' contexts.
You have trouble with XFree, then you post relevant parts of
/etc/X11/XF86Config-4 and /var/log/XFree86.0.log (you are usually
specifically asked for this files).
You find a glitch in MSW, and there you go trying to describe the
"click-path" that triggers it, the un-copy-pasteable error messages in
some dialog boxes, the possibly missing display elements, etc.
Some of the questions and answers in MSW-related forums and newsgroups
involve a lot of imagination regarding to screen navigation and
iconography. In Linux(should I say Unix?)-land almost anything is a
cut-n-paste away.
Not to mention that it ain't easy for your local guru to ssh-in and
medicate your system :-)
--
Cristian Gutierrez http://www.dcc.uchile.cl/~crgutier
crgutier[@]dcc.uchile.cl Jabber:crgutier@jabber.org
"UNIX is like a Vorlon. It is incredibly powerful, gives terse,
cryptic answers and has alot of things going on in the background."
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