On Fri, 1 Aug 2003, Ben Francis wrote:
This is why when i ask questions to anyone about Linux and get a reply that includes manually editing a config file or writing some code by hand - my negative response often suprises people and has in the past been taken as a personal insult. (Perhaps Linux is suffering from Mac-syndrome whereby its users so religiously defend it that they take any critisiscm personally - or perhaps I'm just offensive ;) )
The fact is, I see myself as the kind of person who would be perfectly willing to spend the time fiddling with code, comand line commands and config files to get something to work, hacker style, and indeed I do - but not everyone wants to (or indeed should have to)
I think the manually-editing-config-file problem arises from a lot of people (on this list anyway[1]) use distros that don't have the GUI front ends for doing a lot of system stuff. Personally, I started off with linux on suse 8.0 but moved on to linuxfromscratch after about 5 months. I've never touched mandrake (apart from a quick install to see what it was like) so if someone asked me how to do something on a mandrake system I would have to resort to 'edit this file' since I don't know all the whizzy tools mandrake has to do stuff. Suse is a different matter since I've used yast 2, but I would guess that someone who hasn't used suse as recently as me would be able to suggest a solution for that which didn't involve manually editing files.
Maybe linux geeks should install mandrake once in a while to see how things are done there?
BenE
[1] I would say this is true for 'experienced' linux users everywhere but I don't have any evidence. (and I put 'experienced' in inverted commas because I'm not suggesting that only debian/slackware/etc. users are experienced (was that a bit too PC?))
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Love is all I bring, in me crass t-shirt 'n' ting