A new users view of the documentation

Fri May 2 12:54:24 UTC 2008

Hi,

One of my colleagues at work has recently installed Heron. He's coming
from a proficient Windows background but a new Linux user. He's been
asking our intranet a few questions and I found that the issues he's
facing all seem to be documentation related. I've answer some of his
questions, and pointed him at the Community Wiki but I thought it
might be a good idea to post his intranet questions on here as perhaps
they point to where the documentation can be improved/highlighted/more
easily found/reorganised etc.

Apologies for the length - I didn't think it fair to paraphrase or summarise.

Therefore, without further ado, "a Linux newbie tried out Ubuntu Heron
and got lost and confused by"....

Begin:
-------------------
OK, I installed Heron over the weekend, by adding an old disc into my
PC. To be fair, I'm comparing Ubuntu AMD64 off a 4200 RPM laptop drive
vs Vista 64 Ultimate off a 70GB Raptor, so bear that in mind where
performance is concerned.

Obviously, I didn't want to trash the other discs in the machine, and
the install gets a lo-o-o-ong way through before you see a
confirmation of which discs are to be written to (and that my NTFS
discs were quite safe). Also, Ubuntu ignored the BIOS setting to boot
from the newly installed disc. I had to revert back to booting from
the Vista drive before the boot manager kicked in. Boot manager adds
quite a long delay to the boot process, too and I haven't yet worked
out how to make it default to Vista if I don't make a selection.

There is next to zero real information for those migrating from
Windows. Why no AV, firewall, anti-spyware / anti-trojan?? I presume
the system is supposed to be safe enough to survive without these
things, but really - it should say so somewhere in bold letters???
(I'd suggest a big link on the distro download page:- "if you're a
converting Windows user, read this before you download anything").
Later, I tried to install a Windows app under Wine. Again, for a
service which is supposed to help with migrating from Windows, you'd
have thought that there might be help available in a form which a
converting Windows user would be able to understand.

I later found some form of firewall app which I could download from
the repository (??), but it didn't do much that I'd expect a firewall
to do (eg limit which apps are allowed to access the internet or other
machines in the network).

Windows users will have accumulated a series of files of types not
natively supported - RAR, MP3, AAC, WMV, etc, etc. Linux zealots seem
to think the answer is to convert this stuff across into Linux
formats. Get real guys, 50% of people will scurry back to Windows at
this point. Have these people never heard of Podcasts? Are they going
to persuade the BBC, and every other provider to make their audio
available in OGG Vorbis or Speex format instead? Good luck finding an
"MP3" player which copes with even Vorbis, and I'm not aware of any
player which can handle Speex. Compression Manager seems to associate
itself with RAR archives, but then complains that the data is in an
"unsupported format". It doesn't even try to deal with multi-part
archives.

Ironically, the Gnome desktop is a straight knock off copy of Windows
UI - I'm almost surprised that MS haven't sued. Almost every keystroke
is the same - Ctrl + c / v for copy / paste. Alt + tab for context
switching (and ctrl + tab for switching sub-windows within an
application), Ctrl + p to print, and numerous others. Windows minimise
to the "task bar", there is an equivalent to the Sys Tray, Programs
menu, Control Panel and Windows Explorer.

So far I've found two bundled DVD burning apps. The one bundled into
the file manager ("burn CD/DVD" on the places menu) doesn't even offer
the option to verify the disc after burning. When it fails it just
says "there was an error writing to the disc" - well, thanks for being
so informative.

The other one (Brasero??) offers burn speeds that don't match what the
hardware is capable of (ie 1x, 3x, 5x, 7x instead of 2.4x, 4x, 8x),
identifies multiple burners as "CDROM1" & "CDROM2" rather than their
actual makes & models, and doesn't seem to be able to burn video. To
cap it all, it can't write more than 4GB to a 4.7GB disc !!!! What
does it do with dual-layer discs???

I also haven't found a "backup to DVD" application yet. There must be
one in there, surely???

At one point I could see the shares on my NAS. Suddenly, the shares
started to disappear, and my NAS somehow got screwed up. I had to
reset the box (which entailed all sort of dire warnings that I would
lose all data). Although the data was retained OK, now only windows
can see the workgroup & the shares, Ubuntu just can't find them
anymore (and the same goes for seeing shars on the other PC, too). I
have deep, dark suspicions that somehow Ubuntu screwed up the NAS, but
no way to prove it (BTW, that runs Debian too, I think).

I can understand why MS have to give you minimally useful apps (eg
WordPad instead of Word), in order that they (or third parties) can
sell you other apps (and to avoid accusations of market dominance).

I can't understand why a Linux distro should give you crap stuff like
this - why not bundle best-of-breed apps? There must be apps of
equivalent sophistication to Nero 8 or ImgBurn (which is freeware, so
comparable). I wouldn't mind trying the DVD version of the distro (ie
4GB vs 700MB), but I can't find it mentioned anywhere on the Ubuntu
site.

Firefox is very similar indeed to the Windows implementation, except
that webpages don't look anything like as nice, it takes several times
longer to load, and locks up frequently (the app momentarily goes
grey). This latter may have been due to the "Evolution data server"
running at 100% on one of my CPU's cores - another impressive piece of
software engineering, there. The package includes a late beta of
Firefox 3, so I will forgive it some visual foibles, such as when you
click "more actions" and the drop-down doesn't come up where you
expect it (as long as they get fixed come the full release).

The quality of video playback is really disappointing (comparing the
same stuff under VLC in the two environments). I think it's mainly
very poor upscaling (of eg 720x576 or 720x480 DVD content) to my
1920x1200 resolution monitor, because everything looks very obviously
pixelated (I'm not talking about blocking or tiling artifacts, just
simply that you can see the various pixels magnified to 3x their
proper size without any smoothing applied). I suspect that my Radeon
card is doing much to improve the PQ under windows - I understand
ATI's Radeon drivers for Linux are universally loathed.

There is very little help available under the help app (which also
takes a long while to load for an app which seems to do nothing more
than present hyperlinked text with no search facility).

Also, when you change any of the settings or preferences, I really
miss all those places where Windows offers you a "reset to defaults"
button.

With a few exceptions (mainly file maintenance in Windows Explorer),
I'd say that Vista (off the fast HD) runs much faster than Ubuntu (off
a slower HD).

At the moment, this feels like the very early version of a project -
the bare bones are there,and you can see where lots of function needs
to be added to make a really useful app. I'd say it feels about the
way that Windows 3.0 was on the day it was released - lots of hype,
but in reality a hell of a long way still to go. That's pretty
remarkeable for v8.04 of something when v1 was already based on mature
underpinnings (ie Debian).

There are a couple of things I do like.

The software repository is superb - thousands of apps available to
download from a secure location, and with a properly managed way to
add them into the machine's setup (although I've read that
uninstalling sometimes isn't very successful).

Window animation is much more snappy, which suggests that the
windowing software is better written (although that's really just
icing on the cake).

Printing to a printer attached to a USB port on the NAS works far
better than printing to the same printer from Windows.

ISTR a rather scathing comment about Gnome from Linus Torvalds which
paraphrases as "to treat all users as idiots is a very dangerous
path". With all the above in mind (if anyone is still reading) - can
anyone recommend that I'm likely to get on better with some other
distro? How about Kubuntu (and is that the same as if I install the
KDE desktop on top of Ubuntu?)
--------------------

Later, after some questions on IPtables, Firestarter and a few other
questions listed above were answered...

--------------------
Thanks again, that gives me a lot more confidence to press ahead with
Linux. The obvious question is why this sort of advice isn't in the
"getting started" section of the helpfile in Ubuntu, nor does it seem
to float to the top when you Google for it.
---------------------

At this point he was directed to http://help.ubuntu.com/Community/

-------------------
If only they hadn't hidden it under a "community" link on the Ubuntu
front page! Would never expect to find documentation under a link with
that name!

In general the help pages do seem to be written with the rule "more
than one paragraph on any subject will only frighten people away".
Also, they seem to avoid recomending individual programs (with a few
exceptions like ufw for firewall).
-------------------

At this point I asked if he minded if I posted his questions to this
list and received a "not at all" followed by:

--------------------
No problem with that at all.

I guess I'd summarise my feelings as:-

There needs to be a document written from the point of view of a
Windows user, which walks through the differences and which
specifically tells you the stuff you need to know to setup a safe
environment. Where Linux is inherently safe and stuff like AV software
is unnecessary, it needs to say so in big letters.

I tried to get going with Wine, and even then no-one even seems to
have considered that documentation needs to be available written from
the POV of someone who's comfortable with Windows but ignorant of
Linux !! Duh. I couldn't even manage to get both of my DVD writers
assigned a drive letter, never mind getting as far as actually
installing any programs.

I mean, what the hell is ~./ ? What's with /bin, /home, /root? Where
have my drive letters gone? What do I need to know about mounting, and
how do I work with some of my drives which are still NTFS because I'm
dual-booting. I'm working through these issue myself, but really
nothing has jumped out at me in the documentation (ie the internal
help).

There's a classic line in BlackAdder when he's trying to communicate
with someone who doesn't speak English. "Right, let's start with the
basics. English is a non-inflected, Indo-European language...".

The help.ubuntu documentation also needs to either include a lot more
depth on the individual subjects, or point off to other sources of
information (eg an in-depth comparison of the features & strengths of
various CD/DVD burning packages). Thinking about it, this really wants
to be present in the add/remove programs (packages?) installer. You're
presented with a list of 30 different packages under a certain
category, a link to details or a comparison table would help you
decide which ones might really be suitable. I am guessing that a
certain amount of investigation is performed before an app is included
within the package installer, so the info must be available.

The help.ubuntu page mentions a single additional CD burning app -
GnomeBaker. When you follow the link (to SourceForge) and search
"documentation" you get back "This project doesn't have any
documentation to search". However there is an option to click for
paid-for support. (Yes, I know that's a failing of GnomeBaker rather
than Ubuntu).

I know that if you took this to an extreme, I'm asking for a "document
everything that's available for Linux"

I guess documentation will always be the weak link in an open-source
project - it's not exactly a sexy / interesting task.

More and more I'm getting a "don't scare the users" feel about
Ubuntu/Gnome, but if that's the type of user they want to attract they
need to provide more hand-holding once the user has got to the "OK,
I've installed it, now what" stage.
---------------------

Whilst I know you can scratch many of these off the "complaints list"
with a "it's in the docs" but the issue here seemed to be that the
docs didn't cover what this user was looking for if he actually found
them. Of course, the obvious answer is "Well, Steve - now you know
what sorts of things people find they need help with you can begin to
document it" and I completely agree with you. Are there any works in
progress for addressing these sorts of issues (such as, the installed
documentation in the distribution is apparently scant and unless
you've managed to get your machine online you're a bit stuck)?

Is this kind of post of any use in deciding where more (or more
in-depth) docs are probably required?

-- 
Steve
When one person suffers from a delusion it is insanity. When many
people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.

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