This is the fundamental problem I've had with Linux in general -- it's a royal pain in the ass.
Personally, I find Linux scary... and I'm probably technical enough to qualify for its intended audience. I find the entire process intimidating. I think this is mostly because of the documentation. The documentation is, to put it bluntly, a fucking mess.
For starters, the installation process is documented *on the web*, which strikes me as galactically stupid -- if I had an internet connection, I'd also have an OS already and thus probably wouldn't need Linux. While I admit this is fine for those of us who are using this as our primary OS, it's entirely useless for the general user Linux wants to woo -- the user who is using Linux as their sole OS and won't have an internet connection until Linux is actually installed. Is it really that hard to put an explanation of the installation options on the screen during the installation process? My router's UI does that whenever I want to change the settings -- it's extremely handy.
The other problem with the docs is that it's written, as you pointed out, by devs. Half the time I can barely understand what the docs are saying; my grandmother doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. Windows gives you plenty of walkthroughs; Linux gives you "man chmod".
The other thing I've noticed is that while it's great that steps have been made to document config files and write GUI apps that make things easier on the user, they really don't. The GUI apps generally don't take the time to actually *explain* anything, instead just masking the config file editing; the config files, while well documented, are still config files. No matter how well you document a config file, having a user performing the following steps to change things...
1.) Find the config file 2.) Edit to taste 3.) If you're lucky, restart the service; if not, recompile the application and restart it
... is not intuitive. Ever.
I fully admit that it may have been that I was using a crappy flavor -- I tried Debian, I think -- but that was one of the problems in the first place: which flavor to use. With Windows, it's simple: XP. Home or pro? Choose one; the installation and usage processes will be identical. But Red Hat vs. Debian vs. Gentoo vs. Mandrake vs. TinyLinux vs. Bob's Homebrewed Distro? Balls if I know.
I should give it another shot -- I gave up last time when I was unable to do something as simple as sharing out a media drive on the Linux box so that the Windows machine could use it -- but I dread doing it.
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Personally, I find Linux scary... and I'm probably technical enough to qualify for its intended audience. I find the entire process intimidating. I think this is mostly because of the documentation. The documentation is, to put it bluntly, a fucking mess.
For starters, the installation process is documented *on the web*, which strikes me as galactically stupid -- if I had an internet connection, I'd also have an OS already and thus probably wouldn't need Linux. While I admit this is fine for those of us who are using this as our primary OS, it's entirely useless for the general user Linux wants to woo -- the user who is using Linux as their sole OS and won't have an internet connection until Linux is actually installed. Is it really that hard to put an explanation of the installation options on the screen during the installation process? My router's UI does that whenever I want to change the settings -- it's extremely handy.
The other problem with the docs is that it's written, as you pointed out, by devs. Half the time I can barely understand what the docs are saying; my grandmother doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. Windows gives you plenty of walkthroughs; Linux gives you "man chmod".
The other thing I've noticed is that while it's great that steps have been made to document config files and write GUI apps that make things easier on the user, they really don't. The GUI apps generally don't take the time to actually *explain* anything, instead just masking the config file editing; the config files, while well documented, are still config files. No matter how well you document a config file, having a user performing the following steps to change things...
1.) Find the config file
2.) Edit to taste
3.) If you're lucky, restart the service; if not, recompile the application and restart it
... is not intuitive. Ever.
I fully admit that it may have been that I was using a crappy flavor -- I tried Debian, I think -- but that was one of the problems in the first place: which flavor to use. With Windows, it's simple: XP. Home or pro? Choose one; the installation and usage processes will be identical. But Red Hat vs. Debian vs. Gentoo vs. Mandrake vs. TinyLinux vs. Bob's Homebrewed Distro? Balls if I know.
I should give it another shot -- I gave up last time when I was unable to do something as simple as sharing out a media drive on the Linux box so that the Windows machine could use it -- but I dread doing it.