OSNews

I completely agree with the spirit this article, but implementing answers is a difficult ask.

Most Linux documentation is very hard for mere mortals to understand. Leaving aside the very-hard-to-digest man pages, have a look at this email reply that a sender gets to an email sent with a suspected virus attachment:

============================================================
Our Linux email gateway has detected that your message to
<email@address>
MAY contain hazardous embedded scripting or attachments,
or has been rejected by our site security policy for some other reason. If you have a question, please reply to this notification message.

It is POSSIBLE that your message was infected by a virus.
You should make sure your virus signature file
is up-to-date and then rescan your computer,
especially if you do not remember sending this message.

If the macro scanner score is large yet your virus scanner reports that the document is not infected, try saving it using a different format (such as Rich Text - "RTF") that will remove all macros.


REPORT: Trapped poisoned executable "bqqep.exe"
REPORT: Not a document, or already poisoned by filename. Not scanned for macros.
STATUS: Message quarantined, not delivered to recipient.
============================================================

I am a sysadmin of a small (~30 user) Windows network, and the network users would have no idea what this meant. All this talk of:

email gateways
site security policy
hazardous embedded scripting or attachments
macro scanner score
macros
poisoned executable
already poisoned by filename
not scanned for macros
message quarantined

is just a foreign language to them. They would just tune out after the first difficult term and stop reading. They may have heard of some of the following, but their understanding would be limited:

virus signature file
up-to-date and then rescan your computer
document is not infected
a different format

This is typical Linux documentation and shows clearly that the writer has little understanding of the technical ability of the average Windows user. Until software and documentation is written for the "lowest common denominator", Linux will struggle.

I am going to offer my services to start rewriting some of this undigestable stuff into text that people can understand and enjoy reading. However, I feel that I will meet some opposition from hard-core Linux heads that are unwilling to make it easy for them and will insist that users must understand their techno-babble.

We'll see.

Raylene.