Why questions don't get answered, or "No, I've already RTFM, tell me the answer!"

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2005-12-29 at 12:30, Charles Howse wrote:

> > How would it work the other way around?  Suppose you were
> > having your first experience by installing windows and about
> > 3,000 programs all at once.  It doesn't usually happen that
> > way because you buy the box with windows pre-installed
> > and can't afford that many add-on programs at once.
> 
> Whew!  I'd hate to know I had to spend that much time installing Windows
> apps.

A few years back I bought one of those Dell specials that came
bundled with win95 and a bunch of windows apps.  It came with
21 CDs.  Later I changed the hard drive and reinstalled everything
with win98.  It took 3 days and I'm not sure I had it all working
at that point.  

> I think it's great that Linux comes with so many applications!  But, since
> Linux is open-source, not everything works as expected, nor has sufficient
> documentation.  Would you agree?

No, it isn't a symptom of being open source.  It is more that you
didn't pay someone to build and test your hardware with exactly
the set of apps you need and pre-install most of it.  If you
google for any windows app and 'install problem' you'll find
just as much trouble as anyone has with linux.  If you look
through Microsoft's knowledge base for problems you'll see
they exist and things don't work as expected even on things
that aren't open source.  You just avoid a lot of the problems
if you buy a pre-loaded, tested bundle.  You can do approximately
the same if you know someone with a system that already works
the way you want by copying his exact hardware and software
setup - and with free software it is even legal.

> That's why I love my Mac.  It 'just works', and it gives me all the great
> Unix tools. 

Even there, you are just lucky - and you can expect to buy a
new version of the software every year or so if you want to
stay current.  Macs rarely have to deal with the case of
someone installing something that hasn't been tested under
exactly the same hardware/OS combination - and I've had
trouble with it anyway.  My powerbook stopped talking to
my firewire camcorder halfway through importing a tape.
Several months and a few software updates later it worked
again and there was nothing I could do meanwhile to fix
it.

> No one can know everything, that's why we ask questions.  :-)

And no one can answer everything, so they tend to reply
to things where they have recently solved the same problem.
Thus 'I got this error...' is a good thing to include
with the question.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com