Why questions don't get answered, or "No, I've already RTFM, tell me the answer!"

[Charles Howse]

> On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 09:07, Charles Howse wrote:
> 
>> My first experience with Linux was when I bought a book about Linux that
>> contained Red Hat 5.  Didn't know what a man page was until I finished
>> reading the book.  Today I am still dumbfounded sometimes by the lack of
>> help contained in a man page, or by the over abundance of terms that I have
>> to stop and look up, then try and understand whether that applies to my
>> situation.
> 
> You really have to understand what the shell does to every
> command line before starting a program before reading other
> man pages. The concepts of i/o redirection, wildcard filename
> expansion, and environment variable setting are not repeated
> in the man pages for every program even though they may be
> useful or even necessary.  Man pages are meant to be a reference,
> not a tutorial.  A tutorial should be a separate volume since
> you normally only need it once and never want to see it again
> while you may need the reference for obscure options later.
> Unfortunately, a tutorial doesn't exist for some programs
> you might want to use.

Agreed, but apply what you just said to someone who decides to trash Windows
and start using Fedora for the first time.

There's lots of documentation on installing, so if they get it installed, I
would think that they would have a tremendous amount of studying to do to
become fairly competent.  Troubleshooting can be a nightmare.

I don't want to take the thread off towards open-source vs. 'closed-source',
but I think you will agree that there is a steep learning curve going from
Windows to Linux.  Probably not so steep if Linux is your first OS. 

I guess I'm saying that there just has to be better help...onboard and
online.