An open letter to Miles Brennan

[Les]

On Sun, 2007-12-16 at 19:54 -0500, David Boles wrote:
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> John Summerfield wrote:
> > David Boles wrote:
> > 
> > so? Smiley or no, the likelihood of the author following the list isn't
> > great, there's a lot of email on this list and I often ask myself why
> > I'm here.
> > 
> > Were I the author of the document, I don't think I'd be happy with the
> > original email. Would you?
> > 
> > If Timothy had tried to contact the Miles and been unable to do so,
> > asking here for help to get it up2date would be another matter altogether.
> 
> 
> My comment was meant to be taken as a gentle elbow to the rib cage,
> hence the smiley, and not as an insult.
> 
> As for this list? I have seen what appears to be an increase in Newbies.
> Which is good. Good for Fedora and Linux in general. We were all Newbies
> at one time.
> 
> Do you also follow any other Fedora lists? There are a ton of Newbies on
> the fedora-testers list. Newbies at Rawhide for sure. And many Newbies
> at Linux.
> 
> The Newbies questions and the 'how-do-I-do' questions don't bother me
> one bit. What bothers me are the Newbies that installed Linux, any
> distro, and know nothing about it. No research, reading, nothing. Just a
> DVD and - now what?
> - --
> 
But they all have to start somewhere.  Somewhere they heard that Linux
would do what they needed, and so they loaded it.  When you first
started on computers, how did you learn?  My guess is that you got a
computer of some kind, loaded whatever software you had and began
playing with it.  Eventually you bought some books, took some courses,
and began to build your knowledge.  These newbies will likely do the
same.  Also some are not interested in the ins and outs of OS's, but
just some form of computer usage.  There should really be no need to
know how the computer OS actually works for most users.  Linux is not
quite there yet, but it is going in the right direction, and that is
important.  The OLPC projects reflect some of that, the easier desktops
also show it.  The audio, video, games, graphics and image processing
are other  speciality areas where the OS is just the platform.  These
folks could care less about how the network operates, or how dns works.
What they have is some creative juices that require an outlet.  Lets all
help them make Linux that outlet.

Regards,
Les H