You sir, are wrong.

ALL users will demand things you never want them to. ALL users will learn how NOT to utilize what is available. Users will NEVER read the manual or wiki. That’s the way of the world. The sooner we accept it in Linux, the better. Once we accept it, we can move on to solving problems that we should solve instead of giving reasons why users should “be this tall to ride”.

Arch, Gentoo, LFS…NONE of those are for new users at all…and they never will be. The only distro suitable for new users (not new tech users mind you…non techie new users who don’t know what a codec is and who only use Windows to websurf) is one that requires them to drop to the shell the least or not at all.

There are enough distros out there that those of us who think this is stupid can use Arch, Gentoo, and LFS and those that think this is correct can use the $Distro_that_doesn’t_require_the_cli and everyone will be happy. There are enough distros for all of us.

One might also point out that there are *many* things in life which are not “newbie-friendly”. Calculus, open heart surgery, physics, cooking pufferfish, raising children, piloting a Stealth bomber, being President, and genetic engineering, to name a few.

Yet only in the world of computing do people demand absolute, total flattening of all skill levels. Meanwhile, I’m over here with these advanced tools which *I* *need* to do my work, and the user-friendly police are snatching them all out of my hands screaming, “You can’t use that! It’s not newbie-friendly!” Oh, well, bye bye command line, compiler, programming language, network tools, scripted interfaces, web servers, customizable plug-ins, and everything that made Linux worth using in the first place…

We’ll all be shivering naked in caves eating raw meat when it’s all done, but at least nobody will be elitist any more!

Sam: I totally agree.

…but */I/* want Arch. I want ONLY what I manually request, no extra daemons and such. I want to hand-edit and tweak configurations. But so many people don’t, they think no one wants to. That’s the problem.

They need to stay on their turf and let us tinkerers play with our systems.

Changing Arch midstream to be more newbie friendly, is liking sinking the ship. We already have a bunch of different distros out there that fulfill this object. Let them use that instead.

There should be different types of distros, ones for absolute beginner newbies, others for intermediate and then for the experts to use. Every distro should not bow to the newbies and be newbie friendly. If you can’t figure it out, then it isn’t for you.

Ubuntu should stay as an entrance for newbies to enter the world of Linux. It is mostly GUI oriented, and is very simple to use. Arch on the other hand, should remain for the experts.

One day these newbies who finally become tired of how ‘simple’ the distro works, will seek something more advanced, and should find it. Not something that when they step across to it, seems the same as what they just left.

If every distro is the same, then there is no room for advanced users.

As a “computer user” you want your work to be done, as swift and smooth as possible, so a All-In-One distro like Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, Mint, Mepis, … is ideal. What about Arch or Gentoo? Can’t you do your work with them? Sure you can, once they are installed and once installed their use differs very little from the All-In-Ones.

The only difference between, let’s say PCLinuxOS and Gentoo, is in the installing and configuring of the distro. If I have a Gentoo user who is willing to come over and assist me in installing Gentoo + KDE on my box, I will have a good, stable working distro. OTOH if I boot PCLinuxOS and I ‘play’ a bit with the Live CD before installing it, I will also have a good, stable working distro.

Being newbie-friendly is mainly the choice the devs must make and as the need for simple, out-of-the-box distros is growing, so will be the numbers of distros that conform to that demand.

A “computer hobbyist” on the contrary is a different kind of computer user. He is not so much interested in the post-install use of the distro, but his interest lie in the installing, tweaking, knowing where what config is doing … A typical newbie-friendly is not something they look forward to. They now what distro to pick, be it Arch, Slackware, Gentoo or BSD.

I am a computer user and for me, a distro that gives me the possibility to do my daily work is all I need. I went for PCLinuxOS and I am very happy. Does that mean that I couldn’t install Arch or Gentoo? No, probably not, but I don’t see the point in compiling the whole of KDE if I can have one already precompiled.

Alain