Re: [tlug] Printers for linux, was: refurbished Thinkpad X60 with Coreboot & Linux

[Benjamin Tayehanpour <benjamin@example.com>]

On 28 December 2013 16:04, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:
> Well, you know, in *my* world that simply isn't true.

Good for you. :) Fair enough, you do put forward some excellent
examples of projects with good documentation.

> So what it comes down to is that applications intended to "make Linux
> easy to use" are what you're talking about.  But those aren't part of
> *my* world.

Well, not really *my* world either, as I don't really suffer from it.
But many open source (or open sourced. Especially those) projects do
lack documentation. CUPS. PulseAudio. X, as you've mentioned. While
the lack of documentation doesn't affect me daily, it does affect me
when I have to go there and do stuff people generally don't do, such
as multi-seat workstations or audio over Ethernet. Both examples of
stuff fairly straightforward to do with the aforementioned projects,
but the documentation is sketchy at best and the guides outdated or
simply mistaken.

> Except that all the distros seem to have decided that
> CUPS is the way to go.

Hopefully this increased amount of attention will lead to more
documentation being written.

> Only if you want to rewrite that code yourself.  That matters to me,
> but not to most people I advise about computers.  Nor can they afford
> to pay somebody to fix little bugs in LibreOffice, even if the code is
> public and freely licensed.  And it's not very useful when you report
> a bug (the code's the doc, so whatever it does is correct ...!)

Well, not really. That's like saying a typo in the doc would change
reality to fit the mistake. Nothing written by man can be infallible;
people believing in such nonsense usually end up killing each other
over it.

> That wasn't about home, that was about my university students.  But as
> for home, my home is Japanese, I don't even control my own wallet. :-)

Sorry, I misunderstood in that case. :-)

> lose or duplicate Japanese text in many cells for .xlsx files).

Well, that's what you get for working in a non-native file format.

> Back at school, I'd love to be able to force the students to use less
> featureful presentation software.  It's always a struggle to get them
> to spend as much time on the words as on the fonts and special
> effects....

My word. You've tried forcing Xemacs on them, haven't you? :-P

> Mostly mine ... I gather you don't have a Kansai wife or a 16-year-old
> daughter (any race or geography).

I regret to say I do not.

> It's hard enough to get the kid to
> bathe ... until *after* her bedtime ... of course it takes another 40
> minutes to prepare for the bath....

Um. If she's sixteen years old, doesn't she prepare her own bath?
Unattended work isn't work, you know!