On Fri, Apr 25, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
max bianco wrote:
>
> > If you want to control what people do, you don't give them the root
> > password. But, the 'average' PC user is his own administrator,
especially
> > for something like fedora which is way to high-maintenance for an
> > experienced administrator to choose to manage for everyone else, and
he's
> > going to need to use the stuff whether it is hidden or not. The question
is
> > whether you want to make it simple or make it confusing. You seem to
want to
> > make it confusing just so everyone suffers as much as you did when
learning
> > the arbitrary quirks of the distribution.
> >
> >
> >
> Not so they suffer, so they learn.
>
Learning how to fix the quirks of one or another particular distribution
has a very limited value. If you want someone to learn, you need to make it
easy to find the tools that work the same across unix-like systems so they
will learn the things that are more broadly useful. Remember the whole books
of crap about how to work around problems in dos/win3.1/95/98 etc.,etc.?
You could have memorized them all and it would be worth nothing now.
Learning where some program lives on some version of some fast-changing
linux distribution is the same sort of knowledge. Not only will it be
useless in the likely event that it changes in the near future, but there
will be a point where it will be harmful that what you think you know is
wrong.
> If the users are advanced they can
> modify their profile to suit them,
>
Advanced users aren't the point when you create system defaults, but
supplying a usable PATH won't hurt them either.
> i am concerned that a newbie, and
> more and more are jumping on board, just like me, will inadvertently
> screw himself because accessing more advanced commands was to easy and
> did not come with a warning that an advanced user doesn't need ,
> because instead of forcing them to learn the quirks,
>
You can't 'force' someone to learn anything, you can just make them resent
whoever created the stupid quirks in the first place.
> it was decided to
> hell with him the inconvenience caused to the advanced user, who can
> work around it but doesn't want to because he or she is too lazy, is
> too great.
>
You are making a very good argument for that user to find a different
distribution if you are doing things just to make him work harder.
You are working very hard to intentionally misunderstand where I am
coming from, easy is not always better. I understand your arguments
and they are sound. Fine and good , I am merely voicing my concerns.
Will you address this concern?or continue to ignore it? What about the
user who hoses his system with fdisk by accident? Will he love Fedora
for it?
Max
Max