At 10:03 AM 2/2/04 -0700, you wrote:
On 2004-02-02, Uwe Dippel penned:
> This was on Slashdot and this is what I see around me. Very good,
> applause !
>
> ... However, this list gets out of hands. With a few hundered posts
> per day; it's almost impossible to follow.
Wow... I was *just* considering whether I should take the time to post
a message before un-subscribing to the list. Since someone *else*
brought-up the subject, I hope that my one, small opinion will be of help.
> How about creating sub-topics ? Newbies, X, Kernel (2.6),
> Applications, Advocating, General Discussion, Printing, you-name-it.
> I'd like to learn, share and give, but currently about 80-90 % of what
> I see is repetition, noise, shallow. Even clicking through
> (downloading) takes simply too much time.
Yes! More discretization is definitely needed!
I think that genuine newbies who don't know how to find information in
the first place, and may not know which domain applies to their
particular problems, anyway, will end up posting to the "wrong" list
anyway, and getting flamed for it ... causing more noise ...
Wrong, IMO! I think it is quite arrogant to dismiss a "newbie" list
because of an attitude that "newbies would be too dumb to find it!"
*I'm* a Debian newbie, and *I* spent the time to find-out which list I
should use for help on installing the distro! Just because I'm a
*Debian* newbie doesn't mean that I'm a complete idiot, and that there's
no use trying to split-off a list for new users like me! Sheesh!
And what about discretization in other areas? I asked a question about
the Debian install (3.0 r1) not recognizing my HDDs connected to a
Rocket-133 PCI-IDE card (a few days ago---titled "New Debian install +
Rocket133 = no HDDs! (Please help..."). I followed-up my first post
with some details I forgot (like the version of Debian and the fact that
I tried *all* the installs, starting with the 2.4 kernel). I included
*lots* of detail---as much as I reasonably could. Please look! I spent
a *long* time composing the e-mail, so that I could provide a
reasonably-well-formed question. The result? I got *one* reply (thank
you!), but it suggested: (1) use the "bf24" install---which I was
already doing, and (2) build a new kernel for the install---an issue
which I had addressed in my follow-up post (basically saying that I'd
never compiled a kernel before, and even if I *did* compile a new
kernel, I didn't know how to use *that* kernel for a Debian installation).
The end result? The end result is unfortunate for Debian. I really
*did* want to try Debian, but with the only response I got to my
hour-long-researching-post being "compile your own kernel", that pretty
much shut this new-comer down! So, I'm probably going to be using
Gentoo instead. I don't know yet whether I can get the Gentoo install
to work with my Rocket-133 raid disks (created with a Red Hat 9
install), but the documentation for Gentoo is very friendly, and I'm
hoping that if I have a problem that I'll be able to get help---without
my request for help getting drowned in a sea of 200 messages per day
(and where many of the messages are just about general-interest or
opinion topics---not experienced users helping new users). In the few
days that I have been on this list, I can say that I have seen many,
many requests for help go unanswered.
Maybe I'll be able to give Debian a try at some point in the future, but
at this point, it feels almost unsupported to me. I'm not saying that
there's no help here, I'm just saying that the volume is *crushing*, and
that it seems that many of the requests for help are being lost in the
volume!
If there are many things you'd like to know about, why don't you post
and ask about them? No one is forcing you to read through all of the
myriad threads on this list. Just mark uninteresting threads "deleted"
and move on.
--
monique
It sounds to me that you imply that anyone who doesn't have a good mail
client just shouldn't bother with this list. I, myself, haven't had the
time to migrate to Mutt on my RH9 Linux box, so I'm temporarily
putting-up with Eudora on Win98 (even though I *hate* it and Windows!).
Once again, I find your attitude elitist. Fine, maybe you and your
*good* e-mail client can handle the volume on this list, but what about
me and my *Windoze-average/crappy* e-mail client? If the new Linux user
*must* run Mutt (or any other good Linux client) to post to this group,
then the majority of new Linux users are excluded.
Bruce.
p.s. I'll stick-around for another day or so, to see the responses to
this thread, but in the meantime I'm Gentoo-ing! :-)
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