Linked by Iain Alexander on Thu 17th Apr 2003 07:28 UTC
Several days ago I wrote a rather scathing article about my utter dismay and disappoint with Mandrake 9.1 and by association, Linux as a whole. Since then I have had many many flames and equally as many agreeing emails (is there a simple opposite word for flame?) Since then I have been trying, really really trying to get my system working fully. But time and again I'm coming up against the same brick wall of (un)usability, computer esotericism and down right idiocy. 
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The interesting thing with this and similar articles is that more people are trying to do useful and productive things with Linux.
These users expect Linux to just work. In the past Linux users had the attitude that a lot of things would probably not work with or would take a good bit of figuring out in order to get them working.
I agree that most Linux distributions today have too many options and that systems should concentrate on a few good applications. I don't need 4 editors, 5 chat programs, or 6 web browsers.
Most linux documentation is quite poor. What I think people need are decent instructions on how to accomplish a certain task on their Linux system. It appears that most linux distributions release new versions without doing tests with users to see if they can accomplish desired basic tasks.