Why Linux needs help
I just stumbled on an older article about Linux. Well, to be honest it’s pretty outdated at this point - it’s from 1999. However, it’s interesting to hear this person talk about the difficulties of Linux. The author, Andrew Leonard, speaks of the need for Linux developers to prepare the OS for ’stupid users’. He suggests there’s a trend for Linux development to reflect the needs of the dedicated and the far-far-left-brained rather than any moderate population or new users.
“Help isn’t cool.” And in the free software/open-source world, hackers like to do things that are cool. A whiz-bang graphical user interface that allows you to configure your desktop to look absolutely any way you please is cool. But plodding through the grunt work of writing documentation that will hold even the stupidest user’s hand is not.
