And the forums there are aware of this problem

I’ll tell you that 99% of the time when threads remain unanswered it’s because no one knows the answer. Either your problem is too obscure, your hardware is too obscure, or the program you’re having problems with is too obscure.
To all those with zero-reply threads…

they also have a “team” that is supposed to be working on unanswered questions, unfortunately they don’t seem too active and looking thru that part of the forum I see a couple of questions ask there that haven’t been answered. lol. In fact the forums recently started this thank you thing where ya can rack up thanks and it shows beside your avatar and all the team members working on unanswered posts have less thanks than me except one, LaRoza. And she ( I gather she is a she from a post there) has a ridiculous amount of thanks and is active every day. She is also a vegetarian vegan actually according to another post there, but that is beside the point. I just notice things like that because I’m vegan too. lol

I guess this might be the unfortunate outcome of popularity

Yep, I believe you are right there.

Me: I managed to get my sound working under Gutsy in like 20 minutes by installing one package, and adding a single line to /etc/modules. I seriously didn’t expect it to be this easy. Gutsy is awesome!

Normal Person: I spent 20 fucking minutes trying to get my sound working. I had to install packages and edit cryptic config files. Why doesn’t this shit work out of the box? Gutsy is teh suck!

Yup… Different wavelengths.

Ubuntu forums are a mixed bag. I never tried posting a question but I found answers there one or twice by goggling. But I agree - a lot of traffic there is just n00bs helping n00bs.

I guess this might be the unfortunate outcome of popularity. As the forums get swarmed by new users, the quality of discussion decreases and amount of silly question grows exponentially. In effect the experienced members withdraw themselves, or change venue seeking a better community.

I’ve yet to have a question answered on the ubuntu forums (and having worked in support, I know how to write a lucid, concise question), though I have had a bunch of ‘me too’ replies. Newbie questions - low hanging fruit - is easier to answer, but the more technical stuff just gets lost in the chaff.

Amen bro. Ubuntus forums need a lotta work. I think the problem mostly is a lot of newbies go there for help and very few gurus are there to help. This is bad for ubuntu as peoples questions are actually important to them at least. Ubuntu is losing users as questions go unanswered and some of the new users go back to Windows or Mac or whatever. I myself i can deal with it because i love ubuntu and any question i ask unanswered there I will either figure out myself or I will just ignore it if I can. If my system is totally trashed and doesn’t work any more and I can’t fix it in a reasonable time and get no help I guess i would just have to reinstall. So far that hasn’t happened. lol.

having switched to ubuntu for my work desktop about five months ago, and helping my housemate to install ubuntu on his laptop around the same time, I’d have to say I’ve encountered a very, very mixed response for both of us.

Some things are really nice, other things are just plain impossible. The big downer is that finding help in the linux world is a skill in itself. For example, my housemate inherited a pair of bluetooth headphones. In order to get them working, I had to pull information from three disparate sites, the primary one being in Spanish. And that was just to pair the device - apparently if you use linux on the desktop, you’re a nonentity if you use any bluetooth device that isn’t a phone.

But this is just one facet of what I consider to be a big neg for the linux world: finding discrete help is difficult. There’s so much chaff out there (I’m particularly looking at you, ubuntu forums) across so many sites, so many distros, so many versions of distros, that you have to have a fair understanding of what’s going on so you can tell a) whether the help you find for another distro is useful to you; and b) whether the help you find is going to help you or hose your system.

Example: a while back when I first started playing with linux on a laptop, I saw that the way to get my wireless card working was with NDISWrapper, which I installed and got working from a howto on the net. Telling the story to my two experienced linux sysadmin friends (independently), they both shuddered, said I should never, ever use NDISWrapper because it causes untraceable instability, and both of them refused to ever do any troubleshooting on that system. And having seen their skills elsewhere, it’s not because they were hiding a lack of skill.

Example: this machine uses a Matrox G550 graphics card. Old hardware, and matrox is a favourite of linux users. The card is good enough to use compiz. But nope, no can do. There’s incompatablities such that the official matrox drivers and the ones installed by gutsy only support X.org 7.0, the ‘unofficial’ drivers support X.org 7.1, and gutsy uses X.org 7.2. This information wasn’t the easiest thing to find, either - it was buried deep in a thread about something else on some far-flung forum. The result is most definitely that it doesn’t ‘just work’. It could work, but it requires a lot more effort than I was willing to put in.

Ubuntu on the desktop is great if you only ever use webapps and maybe play a bit of music (the only people I’ve found that like OOo are linux power users/advocates). Once you start doing things a little more complex, you start running into trouble. I’ve yet to have a question answered on the ubuntu forums (and having worked in support, I know how to write a lucid, concise question), though I have had a bunch of ‘me too’ replies. Newbie questions - low hanging fruit - is easier to answer, but the more technical stuff just gets lost in the chaff.

This experience has made me value the slow release cycle of Debian a lot more. Need help? Well, fundamental changes to Debian aren’t common, so the help isn’t quite so fragmented. It’s like when you ask a question of windows - unless you’re a sysadmin, you use XP, 2k or Vista, full stop. In linuxland, it’s ubuntu/debian/fedora/centos/suse/pclinuxos/gentoo/whatever, and then you have to work out the version numbers. And while the fundamentals might be the same between distros/versions, the specifics often aren’t. I just find help for Debian less quickly outdated than for other distros, I guess. And version numbers do make a difference; there’s been several times I’ve used help for the previous version of ubuntu only to find out that x or y has changed rendering that help suboptimal or useless.

Regardless of the reason for why this is the case, the final result is this: for the non-elite enduser that does anything even mildly unusual, appropriate help is often difficult to source in linuxland.

anyway, getting a bit long and incoherent, so:

/rant

and yes, ShipIt would be a good option for getting nice CDs, the stack of blanks next to my PC and a quick download on the other hand… that has speed and convenience written all over it.

Question is, did I already download Gutsy, in preparation for trying it out, or is Feisty the most recent one I did that for?

@Gamgee - that’s “N00b” with capital N to you.

In pretty stark contrast to Starhawk’s experience, I got an answer on the Ubuntu forums every time I asked. Maybe they just didn’t like you

I know the forums help people. hell I help people there. I think what it is, I ask questions after I’ve searched forums and google and read the docs and the readmes the applications web site and so on. After spending 4 days (part of the time prob also doing other things) searching and reading and finding either nothing or nothing that helps, then I ask on the forums.

Most people don’t want to try to answer something like that. I’m having a problem now trying to get an certain app to compile ya can find the problem on google only ya can’t find an answer. After getting no help on the forums, tho in this case I did get responses and all but one of them actually tried to help me, I wrote the developer with all the dirty details…And He’s actually very nice and is trying to help, but it has him stumped at the moment after a few e-mails all I have is less warnings and errors. it still won’t install. He insists it should work (in Dapper in theory i might add) but he’s never tried it nor does he even use Ubuntu. So basically I’m stuck and so is he at the moment. At this point I don’t think it is compatible with Dapper, but I can’t figure out why (but I do have an idea maybe possibly why…just not sure) because it should be. I meet the dependencies and all. So maybe together me and him will find the solution to the problem and maybe we won’t.

What I’m trying to say is people only want to answer the easier stuff, and probably many couldn’t answer the harder esp if google is no help.

As to people liking me, yeah that’s funny. Certainly I sometimes piss people off and or shock the hell out of ‘em, got death threats even from assholes on the net, but I don’t think I’ve upset anyone there. And certainly I’m racking up the thanks ya get when people click that star to thanks ya, i’m double digits on thanks now So i don’t think like or not like is the problem.

And yeah KDE is cool, i have both gnome and kde. But I use gnome more and of course i mix and match applications, usually with not much problems. Give it a shot, its pretty and seemingly more tightly integrated than gnome.

In pretty stark contrast to Starhawk’s experience, I got an answer on the Ubuntu forums every time I asked. Maybe they just didn’t like you

Really should give it another go some time soon.. maybe give KDE a look over this time.

Eventually I got frustrated not having audio, and I found Mandrake (now Mandriva). Everything was so bloody easy, I was shocked. I had a nearly-fully usable system that was fully stable. Then I took a break from all technology and media for 2 years: 2001-2003. When I came back Mandrake was still king of ease of installation, but I found Debian and I’ve been hooked ever since. I’ve spent time with FreeBSD (later PCBSD), and Gentoo, but Debian is my favorite.

I like your approach. I’ve encouraged others to use LiveCDs, and I’ve discouraged setting up a dual boot without my help. I had an old machine I used as a lender for a while. It was an old P4 with 512 ram & a crummy integrated intel video card, installed with Kubuntu & some fancy beryl graphics. So I’d let others borrow to test Linux out. When I moved the lender went to a friend.

I do like the VMWare idea. I know I’ve got some Ubuntu vmx/vmdk files sitting around. And installing vmware player is dead easy. The only issue, I guess, is transferring the monstrous file - it won’t even fit on a dvd uncompressed!