"One of my very favorite ink slingers is Ken Starks, immortalized as Helios, slayer of dragons large and small, and tilter-at-windmills extraordinaire. Ken wrote recently, in his usual entertaining style, of his misadventures with a shiny new Linux user, You only know good when you've seen bad.... This shiny new user, Paula, was driving Ken to contemplate some heavy-duty substance abuse (sure, Ken, like we haven't heard that excuse before), but actually the whole scenario sounded more encouraging than dire to me. This brand-new Linux user, this refugee from the Redmond wasteland, was stretching her wings and trying to fly. She edited xorg.conf all by herself, though not quite the right way. She exposed a bug in Ken's customer support (don't use writable CDs for recovery disks). Now how many new Linux users can even find xorg.conf, let alone have the boldness to muck with it? Or even experienced users? The Ubuntu forums are cram-full of command-line fear and loathing; the very sight of a text file drives them into seizures. I think Paula's eagerness to explore and try new things should be rewarded.
"Of course that's easy for me to say, because I don't have to support this customer..."
