Quote:
Originally Posted by
svanslyck
Who said I didn't want to learn something new? What I was complaining about was not the OS but the fact that internet resources about *nix assume a level of sophistication few newbies have. I don't have any complaints about the OS's paradigm but about the instructions I'm finding on the net. Your message is the first one I've seen that explains what sda means, for example. Another example - a four paragraph description of PROMPT_COMMAND that says virtually nothing about it at all.
Svan,
My comment was not an attack on you or whether you particularly wanted to use Linux. However, you are not the first person who has come up with questions, got frustrated and then started to get annoyed with the situation. It is understandable, but in many cases, it ends up becoming a flame war of opinions.
There's nothing wrong with saying "Look, I thought I could do XYZ, I can't, so I am not going to stick it out." Each person has their own threshold for grief, and yes, changing operating systems can be grief. While I think that *Nix has a better way of doing things, if you don't know that way it makes a simple task difficult.
As you are a technical writer, I would recommend that instead of getting a "For Dummies" book, which will probably teach you just enough to get to a point before you want to be, take a look at RUTE's guide:
<redacted>
It will expand in most browsers and give you a good reference for starting out, though, please realize, it is dated and some information may be old and less useful or even wrong, the basics should be there.
I have had many conversations from people who have been using Windows or another OS for many years, and I myself started that way, and was even a Windows System Admin for several years before really understanding how Unix/Linux can be a more powerful tool. Before Power Shell (still know few people who use it on Windows) there was really only cmd/dos prompt syntax for doing things.
Now, when I was creating users for my network (don't ask, they demand islands of isolation so no central system) I did the following:
for i in <system1> <system2> <system3> <system4>
do
ssh $i "useradd -u <userid> <groupid> <secondary groupid> -m -k /etc/skel -d <home directory> -s <shell> -c <comment> <user>"
done
where the items in the <>s were the info. That made my user on 4 systems without having to do it 4 times
There's a lot of power there and Linux can be VERY user friendly, just not intuitive. Once you understand it, its like the handcuffs come off and you are way more powerful at doing the same jobs.
