Pitfalls for the Brave Newbies to be aware of...

Hi! I just want to write in support of your post, nothing more to say but express my total agreement.

Best regards

Hey Bulldogzerofive, thank you for your eloguent and serious response.
Being sort of a scrappy synthesist when it comes to a dialogue, the article is meant to elicit some kind of reaction from anybody working with Open Source computing,especially, in Linux.

I have to say that I do agree with most of your views because believe it or not I am a long time Unix user myself, but you misunderstand my gripe. When I say "newbie" I mean someone just starting a new computing experience with Unix, especially Linux. To these type of Linux users "Dependency Hell" is not a fable. Remember that most Linux users were Windows users before and they come with a different mindset about application management and, most importantly, a lot of them might not have been using Windows knowledgeably. When I talk about stability, I am talking about the hassle that these type of new users have to face just to install and maintain most applications in Linux. I am not talking about the automatic process of installing packages with its mechanism set to prevent this from happening. I am not advocating that you pay for anything when I talk about the Xandros option. In fact, I am expressing my disappoinment with the Linux community for letting Linux be hijacked by the commercial establisment. And yes, my friend, there is a culture of arrogance in a large part of the Linux community. Just to prove that to myself once again, I posted this same artcle in the off-topic forum of a major Linux forum site (http://www.justlinux.com/). Guess what, they could not stand a difference of opinion and yanked the article off their forum the next day after they got a chance to read it. What a pitty!

I think that in a contradictory blind rush to be accepted by the commercial community and at the same time with an eagerness to destroy Microsoft, most of the Linux community has forgotten its own Open Source ideals. Without advocating for the "Great Software Satan" Microsoft, let us not be totally naive and forget that it was them that brought personal computing to most of the civilized world. It was not the classic Mac or Unix. That is a reality that Linux has to deal with. So you see there are a lot of contradictions floating around, but we must not be afraid to admit to ourselves what is obious. Now, how long do you think that "Free" in the Open Source community will stay "Free" if it keeps giving out more than it receives to the commercial world. What has IBM or HP really, really given back? Look at how long Red Hat has been around and look at the meager effort that it has returned to the open source community. It had been half-heartedly touting its Fedora Core Linux project effort for a while, but at the end it had to move development and copyright control into a Fedora Foundation in order to encourage more community participation. Oh no, it was not because of lack of interest by the Linux community. We must empower Unix users even more in order for Open Source to stay Open Source.

One of the key points i guess i missed in my first posting:

I have owned computers for all of about two years, before that i had only used the computers at work as productivity tools. I am not what you would call an experienced user of anything. I am the kind of person who is confused by iPods. For the first year or so that i owned my computer, i ran windows on it. Now i run debian (on my laptop, as well) after a turn with mandrake. Although i like to think of myself as a bona-fide linux user, i was certainly in the recent past (if not still) one of the newbies that you are referring to. The laundry list of things i noted in my last post were intended to show what i, as a total noob, can do with ease.

So, when I say this, it is from recent experience: It is not hard to learn to use linux, even for a newbie.

Dep-hell is not bad at all anymore. apt and urpmi have solved these issues in most cases. True, if you are compiling packages from source, the lists of dependencies are hellish to track down. However, I have yet to hear of a package that would appeal to a newbie that is not available in the repositories for the major distros. If a new user absolutely wants to compile from source, it is generally out of curiosity as a learning experience anyway. Now, if a newbie is using Slack (or BSD, for that matter), that is his own fault. Most of the distros that are not for the new user have that fact written all over them.

And, like i said before, my GNU/linux systems are more stable, secure, private, and managable than they ever were under windows with a similar amount of effort.

I agree that Linux will prosper from an active, positively-oriented community, and that trying to "kill microsoft" is not the way to go. To spread this community we need to stop poisoning the well of potential users (and contributors) with stories of problems that no longer exist. The message needs to be "linux is different," not "linux is hard," because that statement more accurate. It is a different operating system, and if you devote the same amount of time to learning it that you devoted to learning windows, you are going to be OK and you will learn more about how that box next to your monitor works anyway.

Above all, we should NEVER tell newbies that there is only ONE potential distro for them, and that they must pay cash for this distro. The great thing about GNU/Linux is the plethora of choices we have, and the ability to try them out without risk.

And hey, in the end a more productive method of software development might (just might) spring forth. Or maybe the commercial method is really better; i doubt it, but at least this way there is an alternative to serve as the competitive impetus for large corporations to write better software.

And also, with all this talk of a free operating system, i would like mention to anybody following this: Linux is Free as in liberated, not free as in beer. Somebody had to write that code and draw that art. If you use it, you should contribute to the development of the kernel or your distro or some favorite free application in the form of art, code, donations, or cash (within your abilities to do so). Just be careful who you give to and what your money (if you give money) is going to; be sure to give your money to open source (in my humble opinion).

Well, Bulldogzerofive, it is a pleasure to read your posts, although, you don't quite sound like a "Newbie" to me. Nevertheless, I am not going to even try to touch your Gnu/Linux idealism.It's to your credit that you are savy enough to know what to do in Linux as a new user. Let's not generalize, though, from your case. I am glad that you seem to infer that it is not complicated as long as you don't stray away from the prescribed distributions offering and their mechanism. I did point this out when I used Xandros as an example: "But, as it is typical of Linux, this distro is the easiest and perhaps the most productive distro for newbies to seriously work with provided that you stay, upgrade, and function within this distro." I mean, in my opinion, the easiest. No where do I point out that Linux is point blank, thanks to KDE, etc., difficult all around. If so, why would I be pointing to Xandros as the easiest-in my opinion-example. I do not ask you to go and buy Xandros, but I am merely pointing out to the excellent way in which they have engineered all the well known Linux elements to make a strong, cohesive, and highly productive distribution.

I then go on and point out some of the central problems that still exist in Linux, and I do it without underestimating the intelligence of a new user. Yes, these problems still exist and many Linux users that never stray away from their distro-centric usage of Linux and its application management mechanism (RPM, APT, etc.) might miss these problems and think of them as imaginary and rare. Linux is not a computing utopia, computing with Linux does not mean that we have found computing "Holy Grail." I do not know for how long you are going to stay a new user, but I am pretty sure that when the time comes where you can not find an important application that you really, really need that you would prefer not to be compiling source code or hunting down dependencies just to install that program. That's how it used to be in the old "macho" days of early UNIX. I think it's time that we move beyond that.

The central problem that I am really addressing as someone who has experience both in UNIX and Unix is really "Linux distributions politics" and why the Linux community is letting that get out of hand. That distro-centric implementation where the only constant is the kernel is what is poisoning the well of potential users in Linux and why it still has such a small users base. Linux is carrying the ball for Unix and it is important that things don't get out of hand. An enbarrassment of riches as in "variety" does not mean "absolute good" and free as in "liberated" does not mean "general benefit." Good luck in your computing experience.

The point i am trying to make (unsuccessfully, i think, after re-reading my previous posts)is:

1. (The first premise i have, to reiterate):

Given a similar amount of effort, a modern GNU/linux distrubution oriented toward the home or business user is not harder to learn and in many ways is easier to use than WindowsXP and from within this distro and its repositories you can usually do everything you would want to do in XP and more; you just have to be willing to put the same effort into learning it that you put into windows, even with Xandros.

2. (The second premise i have, to reiterate):

Xandros is an example of a distrubution that will do this, and a good one, by all accounts (I personnally have never used it). Where I disagree with you, however, is in your choice of calling it the ONLY distro available for the newbie that will just work for a desktop or workstation replacement to windows. This is simply not true.

3. (The third premise i have, to reiterate):

It is true that as you descend into the world of administration sooner or later you are going to have leave your prefered distro's repositories and compile some zany app from source and deal with dep-hell. But once you have begun that descent, you are no longer a typical end user and you have become an administrator or a computer geek who probably learned how to really use linux on the way down. It is a problem, but not a problem for newbies.

4. (My conclusion, argument, what i really mean is):

Perhaps this article should have been two: one addressed to newbies to recommend Xandros and one addressed to linux users lamenting the current fractured state of the Linux project.


As for the other points you bring up (for what my opinion is worth):

I agree, there is a serious problem in the religious attitude that some people take to their distros. I am not familiar enough with the finer points (or even the broad points, really) of packaging, however it is also serious problem that there is no standard package format or manager.

However, this is simply going to happen in a world where the software relies on many small groups of people on a more or less voluntary basis write little bits of a huge program. Microsoft can dictate a standard format and set of libraries for all programs written for its operating system to use because it has a huge pool of programers who it can devote to writing all this code in secret, which then all be released at one time and cannot be modified until the next release, even if some better library comes along. Linux cannot do this for the simple fact that when something new comes out (like a cool new library for drawing pretty graphics on screen), some developer is going to use it and nobody is going to wait two years for the next stable release of [insert standard distro of choice here]. Furthermore, even if everybody did try to go for a standard release time for kernel and all libraries and whatever else you need under the hood, it would be a massive (to the point of unmanagable) effort to sync new releases of all the packages available to Linux to this release date, especially given the more or less voluntary nature of all those projects. Proprietary software makers can manage it; they have lots of money to dump into such an effort and a coordinated infrastructure; Linux, which relies at least partially on hackers at home for its advancement, cannot.

So, we in the GNU/Linux home user world are stuck with the distro-centric orientation, since these are the people who willing sit down and put most of the best packages together in a format where everything will play nicely together and make GNU/Linux consumable. And, given the variety of uses people have out there, i am not entirely convinced that this is such a bad way to go.

By the way, have you ever used Gentoo?

Bulldogzerofive-I think that your type of level-headed advocacy is the type of advocacy that Linux needs. Those few posts that I've put up in this forum I've done while on a train commuting to work,etc Thus, I can not claim that they are entirely understandable. Some of them are quite bad.

As long as you bring Windows up, try this: put a brand new user in front of a Windows computer
and allow him/her to experiment with the interface. Now, put the same user in front of a Linux computer with the KDE or GNOME interface ( These are excellent GUI's) and allow him/her to experiment with the interface. Chances are that this new user sooner or later will trip up while using KDE or GNOME. That has to do with the fact that sooner or later, through discovery, that user will venture outside the GUI sand box to discover the much harder Unix underpinnings of a Unix distribution. Yes, Unix is harder for the majority of the Windows/Mac GUI baptized users because of its CLI, file structure, and "keep it simple philosophy." This is a contradiction to many people but it has less to do with Unix itself and more to do with computing habits. The Windows interface, as quirky as it is, for example, gives the user different ways to perform basic procedures which a user will discover as he experiments with the GUI. That is an intentional part of the Windows interface design. Unlike Unix applications, applications for Windows hide a lot of functionalities in order to make this possible. This is good and this bad as we all know by now, but it makes for quick learning for a new user under Windows.

When speaking about Xandros, as I said, and state again, I was expressing my opinion about one particular excellent Linux distribution at that moment. My apologies if that did not come through more clear.I also, for example, like what the UBUNTU distribution is putting out.

About your third premise, you can not seriously paint this picture of the Linux learning process and at the same time claim that it is easier to use than Microsoft's Windows. While I don't usually take seriously the opinions of those who don't find even one thing useful with Microsoft products- I'm not saying your one of them- I am a bit confused about this. I think that we will probably never agree on an absolute definition of "Newbie" because it is, to me, a very relative definition,especially when talking about different computing platforms.
The tag line for the Xandros distro is: "Making Linux Work For You" and for UBUNTU: "Linux For Human Beings."
There is nothing wrong with me lamenting this situation

The title of the post mentions the word "Newbie" but it is really addressed to those more well informed.
Beyond that, like I said, I do not underestimate the intelligence of a person wanting to try Linux who happens
to read this post.

You can not seriously expect for Linux administration to be always the reserve of hackers and geeks if Linux or the Unices are going to make open source the standard around the world. This is where I think that the corporate establishment should give back more to the Linux community for all that they have taken out. As has been said, you can not expect a geek, or a hacker sitting at home without any enterprise support or resources to produce quality enterprise wide applications. While this is a commendable tradition in the open source community, things are bound to move beyon that for sure. My optimism about open source lies on the hope of a grand scale implementation of the open source philosophy. This can not come to pass if the underpinning mechanisms are the preserve of a select community.The Linux Standards Base (LSB) is a set of standards for compatibility among Linux distributions that is supposed to bring order to this situation.


I have worked with Gentoo ,but they try too hard to orient themselves to those who enjoy tweaking. I enjoy tweaking but we are talking about Linux for human beings. At home, I have three networked computers, both local and wide to my work outside. On my main machine I have Windows2000 and FreeBSD on their dedicated harddisk for work, on another, My "Lab" machine, I have Solaris and Ubuntu on their own dedicated harddisk. This machine I use for experimenting, and trying out different distributions,etc. My other computer is my dedicated video,image,sound (multimedia) machine running under my own enhanced version of Medialinux. So, you see, I also enjoy tweaking, but general computing is not about tweaking and we, as far as I can tell have been talking about general computing. Cheers...

Hi ! I agree with you at this point, general computing is not about tweaking. Let's say that general computing at home is e-mail, chat, internet browsing, hearing music, playing movies, organize photo albums and maybe keep track of your bank accounts and investiments.
Where have you seen the difficulties with linux ? and more important,
how much time do you thing will survive the
windows box oppened to the internet in your son's hands?

Most windows machines come pre-installed; lets say that you go to the shop and ask for a linux pre-installed box (there are many places where you can do that) and you put the box in your son's room along with the user manual. Do you really think that they are going to have problems hearing music, writting an e-mail, chatting with their friends, etc. ?

When we talk about the difficulties of linux compared to windows, we normally assume that the windows box is running at no expense, but if you put this task in the home user hands you will see that it's not as easy as you painted it and he will probably ask you many questions as well.

In other words, we normaly compare the effort of someone that only have to switch on the pre-installed box, to the one who have to build up the machine first.

Right now I have to go to a friend's home whom have ask me If I can help him recovery their windows box, floaded with viruses, ads, etc. I have convinced him to install a linux distro. Next time when he turn on the power he will see mozilla firefox, evolution, open-office, amaroK and so on. Will see !

Best regards

mierr, jakem, i absolutely agree that computing is not about tweaking. I also agree that a home user will eventually make a mistake using Gnome or KDE and discover that there is, in fact, very complicated system underneath the GUI. Such mistakes are frustrating and will take time to fix. I must however stick to my original conclusion that given a similar amount of effort, a linux box is an easier productivity tool than a windows one; I believe much of the frustration vented toward linux non-user-friendliness from new users stems from the frustration that accompanies learning any new computer system coupled with the prevailing rumors that linux is not user friendly. The rumors give people an excuse to give up in a way in which the fault lays with the computer system and not the person him- or herself. It is a psychological trick; the person remains flawless (which we all want to believe we are) while the computer takes the blame for the weakness. These ''it's too hard'' rumors, however, do not exist in the windows world due to intensive marketing on the part of microsoft; so people take the time to explore and figure it out.

This is why i believe that windows is not easier to administer than windows:

I am aware that it is a logical flaw to generalize from personal experience, but lacking in any other evidence i am going to do it anyway. When i first started using a home computer a couple years ago, i went on the internet to download and install all pertinent windows patches like the newsgroups say to. When i was done with this process, i updated my symantec virus files and thought i was good to go. I conducted no other activities on the internet. The next day i booted my computer and tried to do some work... and after a couple minutes a dialogue box popped up and the computer rebooted 30 seconds later, and continued to do this every time i rebooted. I could barely get on the internet. Thinking i had a bad patch, i tried and tried again to get on line and download a new set of patches. One day on a whim, i updated symantec again (which only takes a couple seconds), and it immediately found a worm called svchost.exe and cleaned it. The worm had infected my computer and the Liveupdate in symantec for some reason had not picked up that particular definition file the first time round.

This experience was frustrating and time consuming and left my computer worthless for three weeks. At the end of it i had learned nothing but the importance of frequent updates, which i already knew anyway.

I had a frustration in MandrakeLinux in that it did not like my NVIDIA graphic card and would crash every time i logged out. That was frustrating and time consuming and took a week to fix, but when i was done i knew how to configure X.

There are frustrations in both operating systems. In linux, however, i found the time i spend learning the system resulted in less time having to administer and protect my box.

This is why i believe that windows is no better a productivity tool than linux:

Another personal example from which i will generalize. I live in a multicultural household. I use a german layout keyboard because it has the most of the special characters that are useful to my family, but the operating system remains in American English. God help you if you do not want to use your windows computer in the way microsoft engineers envisioned it, and having to type CTRL+225 or whatever every second word to get a letter in your alphabet of choice is not an acceptable solution from a productivity standpoint; it takes forever to type anything. I have since learned that you need to run regedit and change a particular HKEY value to do this, but trying to find this information is damn near impossible without paying for it. Every linux distro i have ever used, however, checks the keyboard layout during set up. It lets you configure the computer to be used the way you need to use it.

While of course there are many such things that may apply to other users that do not get detected during setup, similar configuration tweaks are not difficult in Linux, and if you cannot find the answer there are people willing to help you. The tweaks i am speaking of, by the way, are not about making the box look pretty, it is about making the system WORK PRODUCTIVELY for me and my family.

By the way, let's not forget the plethora of FOSS productivity software that, while available for windows in many cases, does not fit into the "closed source" model of development which windows represents (such as firefox, thunderbird, openoffice, the GIMP, the many tools to copy and burn cds and dvds, etc). A similar suite under windows and closed source costs the end user literally thousands, which realistically very few people (especially those living outside of western europe and the more successful of her former colonies) can afford

Bottom line:
Yes linux is a pain in the a**. Lets not kid ourselves, though, so is windows.

Secondly, in linux i can use the computer how i want/need to. In windows, i can only use it the way microsoft engineers thought i would want/need to use it. I am not saying that this makes the engineers incompetent or bad people; indeed they did quite a good job, but they are not clairvoyant their interference makes the box inherently less productive for most people, i think.

How about the Ubuntu version?
Is it any easier to use?
Can it get enough support to be the one version most people use?

If you want to see what you can do in ubuntu and even have somebody tell you exactly how to do it, go to www.ubuntuguide.org. It is a superb website. A word of warning: it was written for ubunty 5.04 and the most current version is 5.10. Most everything is the same, but double check on things like URLs for repositories. Or you can just install 5.04 (the differences are very small) and copy everything verbatim. Of course, you should try to learn about what you are doing as you do it so that you do not need websites like this in the future.

The ubuntu community forum is great as well. As long as you do a bit of research on your problem on your own first (google it and search the forum to see if somebody else had the same problem), you will always be able to find peers to help you get started.

Good Luck!

Your problem has two origins.

Firstly many internal modems are really Win Modems - that is part of the modem hardware is emulated by the processor.Linux does not include this feature in the operating system - you must have a hardware modem.

Secondly, I believe that AOL uses an authentication script that is somewhat unusual and is almost impossible to connect to using Linux. However the producers of the Linspire distro have written a script
that may address this issue and I believe they have released for free download from their "click 'n run" site.

I hope that this is of some assistance.

Trevor

I run SuSe 10 and have been fighting with it to get 3d graphics enabled. Been to over a hundred web sites, tried all the possible solutions with drivers and xorg with no results.
Then I tried a Gforce2 and it was properly seen by the os but still wouldn't let me enable 3d graphics and take advantage of the many applications included in the distro.
Novell says it's up to ati and ati says it's novell's problem.
sigh...

I've worked for Microsoft for about 6 years now.
Now, if you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you
called the brooklyn bridge. It is right down the street from where I live...

Hi !
I think it is different, not confusing. I am a simple user, no tech background in computers. I use winXP at work and Linux at home and ...

At work there are an IT group (very clever guys) dedicated to the network maintenance and support, we have firewalls, virus protection programs, desktop integrity shields, ad_aware, spy_boot, etc, and still we have viruses, and from time to time, some network shutdowns for maintenance.

At home, since I change winXP (installed by the IT group) to linux, I have never had to reboot my computer except for Kernel version update and When I decided to change my linux distro. I have never seen a virus or lost any data due too system hung-up.

Of course, I had to learn different things than plug & play, but I am very satisfied with the results and It was not that hard.

There is something important about linux that you have indirectelly mentioned; while windows is telling you, we are installing the drivers for you, It's also telling you, "don't touch it, don't use it out of this machine, don't share it", etc. Imagine that you buy a book and, in the firt page you read, "you are not allowed to disclose any of this information .... not allowed to use the content in the whole or part ...."
In other words you can read book but you can not create nothing base on the knowledge you have aquired by reading it.

This is one of the reasons that makes linux a cult, and this is the reason cause I am willing to support linux and not windows

Anyway, I will give you a more qualified opinion in twenty years from now.

Best regards.

All this discussion is happening on a server powered by Apache, an open source server. Half the machines Cnet runs are linux. The other half are undisclosed, but also running Apache, so they are on some variant of the Unix (Linux, BSD, Sun). I wonder why?

http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://www.cnet.com

Thanks for that Selwyn.

My tuppence worth is this.Much time spent with SuSE
and never a problem.Its a great O/S complete with near all packages ille ever need.Ive tried Ubuntu as well but over a shorter time.Ubuntu is a bit faster to boot on this machine but multimedia and apps better in SuSE.Layout better in Ubuntu and near impossible to wreck.

Both easy to install and use but Ubuntu doesent include the HD partitioner QTParted which makes resizing the windows partition to create a Linux one easy.

Only item missing in SuSE for me is an AntiVirus app but it takes the F-Prot scanner ok.And that will check the Windows partition from Linux so i dont run AV in Windows but only from Linux but mainly for Windows!.

Ive never experienced the so called dependancy hell with either of these two OS's but then ive been ok with the set package that comes with them.I am expecting dependancy problems with my latest Linux Distro though which is Gentoo.Gentoo is for Geeks and i am more of an intermediate but you have to learn about Linux by useing it.Ive just compiled my first Gentoo Linux kernel and its working ok.That was good.By the time i have finished installing Gentoo and the apps ille prob end up with something like Ubuntu so theres no real point other than getting the experience.But its that i wanted.

Linux evolves in communities and there are many of them each with their distro.That can be confusing i know but eg my first try was with the live Linux CD,DamnSmall Linux which is great......part of the work with DSL goes on here in Wales UK,all the more reason to try it i thought.

Ile put it like this.You wont have much of a prob useing SuSE,Ubuntu or DamnSmall Linux these may be different -a little- to MS Windows but they are no harder to learn to use.

Only thing to be carefull about is that Linux and its differing Distibutions are addictive!!,least they are for some including me.Going to try Mandriva sometime.

Best Regards to you all.Chris C.

I know many who have Linux, and none have had dependency hell... I'm not quite sure what you mean. Can you elaborate? Oh, really. Mine, mine you are the kind
of Linux user that am talking about. Many of the points that you scream about I, if you really read the post that
got you all fired up, I have already answered. Lighten up
Linux as a religion is not a good thing.

What I mean is that dependency hell is not a problem. Use a package manager and everything will work fine.

I didn't say Linux was a religion, but please don't lie as "advice" to newbies. The problem wasn't that you didn't like Linux - that's ok. The problem was that most of what you said was untrue and yet you acted like you knew it.

I see that you still don't seem to understand my motive
for putting up such a post. Yeah, it would seem that I hate Linux, but at home I have three pc's and a Mac and I am running Linux or a Unix variant in most of them.

If you read my other posts, you will see that I am only
asking participants if they want to state their opinion on certain views about Linux and the open source community and on computing in general. Some of the views on the post are distorted views. I am simply asking you to tell me what you think about them. There are many distorted views about the Mac, about Windows, about Linux,etc. I am not into feeding off distorted views.

In your original post, it did not seem like your goal was to see what people thought of the opinions you had put forth. You presented them as friendly advice to newbies thinking about trying Linuxl, acting as if they were universal facts to steer clear of. The reason I acted angry was because you presented them as facts -- and most of them were lies. You did not ask what people thought of it -- you simply said what was, and in the majority of cases, were wrong.

A little knowledge can be more dangerous than none at all.

Selwyn: I think that you should pick out from the post all the points that you think are lies and disprove them convincingly and calmly and also perhaps do it as if you are talking to a "Newbie." In other words try to undo what in your opinion you think I'm doing. I think that you are capable of that.


I really have not met a crazed person in this forum yet. High emotions,yes. Crazy, not yet.