[ Thanks to Carla
Schroder for this link. ]
“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…”