[CentOS] DKMS

Ned Slider nedslider at f2s.com
Sat Apr 5 15:49:38 UTC 2008



John wrote:
> Alan,
> 
> I knew of the Dell article, as I have all of those saved for reference.
> [1] I was just wondering if you knew of any that were for someone knew
> to Linux. You know the Microsoft type tutorials that have screenshot
> with them. That's the question I get asked a lot of times from around my
> home area. 
> 
> In turn when these users that are new to Linux they get discouraged when
> they can't visualy see pictures or have to edit some text file. They
> just use to doing things the M$ Way. CentOS could have a much broader
> user base (Huge), the biggest user base around if simple things like
> this could be done. i realize though it take volunteers to do this on
> the wiki.
> 

Hi John,

Apologies for not being Alan ;)

As an occasional Wiki author, I thought I'd offer you my personal 
insight on this topic. I try to write articles/documentation that is 
broad reaching hence why it tends to be command line based - not 
everyone has a GUI installed, so any guide that relies on GUI methods 
instantly fails to reach a section of the community. I firmly believe 
well written command line based documentation can and should be easy to 
follow, even for the novice user.

Also, IMHO GUI-based tools are not always a good thing. I remember 
struggling with the horrible up2date GUI interface in my Red Hat Linux 
days. It was only a GUI frontend to RPM (??) but it was buggy as hell. 
It didn't take me long to figure out it was far easier to manually 
download updates by ftp and apply them with 'rpm -Fvh *.rpm'. Things 
evolve and now we can simply do 'yum update'. Why add an additional 
layer of complexity where it isn't needed?

Whilst I sympathise with your observation, and I'm sure we all know 
users like that, CentOS isn't Windows and I wouldn't want it to be. I 
would rather we try to educate users to the Linux way of doing things 
rather than turn Linux into a Windows clone. I guess I feel the same 
about documentation to an extent.

Ned




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