[ale] A use for Windows . . .

[attriel]

> I use photoshop not because it is easy to use but because the
> documentation is complete and there are numerous books available to help
> me learn the program. Documentation for The Gimp is a joke. Last time I

In "Open Sources" (printed by O'Reilly, articles from a bunch of the
open-source bignames), RMS (amidst rantings that the Open-Source movement
was misguided at best, evil at worst, for drawing people away from the
Free is for Freedom of the FSF ...) stated that, at the time of writing
(98) Free Software was superior to much of the other unix-based solutions,
and where it existed, much of the Windows-solution software.  Where Free
Software falls down hard, and what's holding it back, is basically the
lack of good documentation, as you commented.

And he's probably right.  GNOME & Bluecurve and things like Open Office & 
others have made it so that linux CAN be a desktop for your average joe. 
As long as they never need to look anything up.  Which kindof upgrades
them from "average."  Most of the documentation is there, somewhere, if
you happen to know where it is and how to ask for it before you find it. 
But, for instance, I was trying to fix the clock on a machine here, and I
would run the ntpdate that's in the cron, and it would fix the clock.  For
about 70 minutes.  Then the clock would drop back 4 hours.  (I assume that
at some point the system was told that the hardware clock was GMT, so
eventually it would say "oh!  that's not now!  that's now there, i'll fix
your display clock b/c we're US/Eastern, not GMT!") ... I never did find
the GNOME sysadmin widget thingie to tell me how to change that, or the
file that told it that ... but someone else asked on the list about the
same thing, and I tried one of those solutions and it worked.  It's had
the right time for a week now!  And once I had the sample command, I could
check the docs for it and knew what it was doing.  I just didn't know what
it was called ahead of time!  (and /sbin/clock vs /sbin/hwclock seem to be
entirely different :o)

And thats enough random tangent :)  The biggest benefit that windows
software has, for the common user, is that it is widely known and well
documented.  And usually more mature.  Hardware drivers are produced by
the manufacturers when they release the product.  A number of companies
are starting to release drivers for linux (according to the RMS article
quoted above), but we still need the docs for people.  And none of the
hackers want to work on documentation, they wanna hack (or they'd be
called tech writers, duh :)

--attriel

("Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution", Edited by Chris
DiBona, Sam Ockman, & Mark Stone.  O'Reilly 1999.
"The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement", Richard M
Stallman, 1998.)



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