Re: Why do I bother?
On Thursday 16 February 2006 18:34, Mike McCarty wrote:
> Hal Vaughan wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > Your attitude is exactly the kind of trolling that kept me from using
> > Debian until within the past year. Yes, you. Katipo. Not the OP.
>
> One of the things which has given me a bad taste in my mouth
> for all UNIX like systems from the start is that they seem
> to breed a "guru" mentality, and an attitude of "if you can't
> figure it out, then I'm not gonna cut you any slack".
That is exactly my point. And it's what originally drove me away from Debian.
I had a new business to run, so it was more important that I could get a
system up and running NOW then start a system and spend all my time doing
administrator things on it because I was just such an "oh, so cool" Linux
show off. I had been using Mandrake for a year or more and wanted something
easy to update and completely reliable.
At that time what I got were comments like, "Well if you expect /dev/dvd to
already exist and don't know how to set up a device, then Debian probably
isn't for you." I had a spare partition I was able to keep up on an extra
system for a while and really tried hard to get it working properly, but
there were just too many extra settings and tweaks to take care of.
While some people helped me, most had the very attitude you described. It
drove me kicking and screaming from Debian and it was over a year and a half
later before I even considered Libranet (Debian based and rather friendly).
Most of that attitude doesn't show up here anymore and seems to have worked
itself out since my first foray into Debian. It literally took me years
before I was willing to try it again.
I was also frustrated because I felt only a few people on the list understood
what I was talking about when I said I had to get my system up and running
and not spend days and weeks on administration. I had to have it in
production and running reliably quickly. The more common attitude was that a
Debian user should know everything they need and if you just wanted to set up
and use a Debian system instead of spending days delving into all the
administrivia, something was wrong with you.
> > I came in with problems, I got fed up, I asked for help and at times
> > voiced how frustrated I was. While there were some helpful people on the
> > list, there were also people trolling against what they called trolls.
> > It just turned me off. I was starting a business, had to worry more
> > about having a system up and working than having time to tweak this or
> > setup that.
>
> This it not by any means unique to Debian. It permeates the Linux
> and indeed all Unix like OS. I've been using Unix like OS since
> about 1984 or so, with Xenix 386. And this is the general attitude
> of about 25-30% of the users of such systems.
Yes, it does. To me it seemed unique, at the time, since I came in from
Mandrake, which is a known newbie distro (and it was quite a good one, too!).
There are some *nix groups that aren't like that, but you are right.
I do think, though, that those who need to be working on the obscure to
elevate their opinions of themselves have either learned to be polite or have
migrated on to something else, perhaps BSD. In the 5-6 years I've seriously
been into Linux, I've seen a marked change in courtesy to newcomers and
friendliness as well as user friendliness.
> I pointed out to him that he didn't even know what "troll" meant,
> but I suspect that it rolled off his back.
He's too busy being right (and insensitive) to care what anyone else thinks.
Hal
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