David Jardine wrote:
On Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 05:54:15PM -0500, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote: [...]The Dreyfus Model of Sill Acquisition [1], describes skills acquisition as passing through five levels: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert.[...]I also taught nursing where we take novices and turn them into advancedbeginners over the course of 4 years.Thanks, Doug! That was most enlightening. Five stages, four years per stage. I'd often wondered why I'd displayed no sign of competence in all my years with Debian, but I see that it won't be long now! Mmm. Or will it?
Indeed, in most respects with regard to Debian, I feel at most like an "advanced beginner," despite having used Debian for about four years now. There are certainly areas of all-around computer usage in which I'm "competent" and even "proficient," but not so much with regard to the specifics of Debian.
I think the issue people aren't addressing in this thread is one of goals. Most people who use Windows are not much more than novices or advanced beginners with respect to the intricacies of Windows operation. Part of the reason for that is simply that most people don't want to be. They want to be able to do what they want or need to do with a computer, they don't really care about the whys & wherefores of how the computer is carrying out the functions they want it to perform, nor about how Windows and Linux distros and OS X differ in their approaches to carrying out those functions.
If these are the people you're aiming at, then going on & on about the Social Contract, the philosophy of open source, the evils of proprietary formats, the importance of standards, etc., etc., is a waste of time. They don't care. They want to get their photos off their cameras. Frankly, I'm not sure any Linux distro, let alone Debian, is a good choice for these people -- Microsoft's and Apple's products do a pretty good job of meeting most of their needs and a great deal of what I see as the value proposition of an open-source OS would be lost on them.
It seems to me the target audience ought to be those interested in distros like Ubuntu, Linspire/Freespire, Mepis, openSuSE, Fedora, and so on. Debian still has a reputation as being too difficult for newbies -- a reputation it once deserved, and in some respects still does, particularly with regard to documentation that's easy to find and easy for those not technically inclined to parse. I used Mepis, then Libranet, then Ubuntu for awhile before I finally got the courage to try Debian, and when I finally did, I found that Debian really wasn't any more difficult than the others. What made the others easier to start with was their laser-like focus on desktop usage. They picked one thing and went with it; Debian, OTOH, is billed as "the universal operating system" -- appropriate for anything, particularly appropriate for nothing. That's the takeaway of such a message, anyway, and I'm not suggesting Debian change it. But if you want the novice user, then you have to be explicit about meeting that users' basic needs and expectations, and honest about what needs that user has that might not be met. I think the question the documentation needs to address (implicitly, anyway) is not "why Debian instead of Windows/OS X?," but "why Debian instead of Ubuntu/SuSE/Linspire/etc.?" Do that and I doubt you'd get too many users for whom Debian probably isn't the best choice.
-- Michael M. ++ Portland, OR ++ USA "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." --S. Jackson