Geoffrey Cowling wrote:
While attending SLUG my main complaint was lack of help. On this list
I got little response to questions (except from persons at my level,
who did not necessarily know either). I felt that unless one was a
professional, or training to be one, there was no support. A nooby,
at school--fine. Amateur with limited knowledge, or out of date
knowledge--no. OK--RTFM, but what if you cannot understand it? It
was more rewarding, after googling, to try foreign web sites. They
tended to be more sympathetic.
It's a complaint that I hear all of the time.
The problem is that this group isn't a free (or paid-for) beginners' Linux support forum. It's
mostly inhabited by fairly high level techies who'd rather exchange details about race
conditions in the latest iSCSI drivers in the kernel, and not by people who are happy to lend
an old bloke a hand with installing Ubuntu.
There isn't really such a beginners' Linux community forum that's easy to find and get to grips
with. Even if there was, if a forum existed populated entirely by beginners then there would
be nobody there to answer your questions. Bringing more experienced people into sucha forum is
going to be hard work, simply because answering questions from beginners all day is damned hard
work. I've done it for periods of time and although I recognise that it's an activity that
needs to be done, it's hard work and I can't claim to enjoy it.
Although I feel your pain, the Sydney / Australian Linux community doesn't actually have a
responsibility to offer unlimited free support to people learning Linux, whether seniors or
not. I wonder, though, if there is a place for an on-line forum of sorts where new people can
ask questions and get answers from a knowledgeable pool of experts, who have agreed to give of
their own time to answer those questions in some kind of roster arrangement.
I'd certainly be happy to contribute to that in some way or form.
--
Del
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