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

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Benjamin Tayehanpour writes:
 > On 28 December 2013 12:55, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@example.com> wrote:

 > Documentation is always poor in our world, unfortunately.

Well, you know, in *my* world that simply isn't true.  Python's
documentation is good (even on the "if you have an email address you
can upload" Cheeseshop), Emacs's is good.  X's sucks, true, but GTK is
quite a bit better (at least the stuff I've been reading lately).
Exim and Postfix are superlative.  PostgreSQL is very good.  So is
Apache.  Django is excellent.  Common Lisp, well, Guy Steele wrote the
book on writing the book.  Knuth wrote the book on printing the book,
and the program *is* the book.  Curl's docs are more than usable.
Even Mailman 3 is getting there (and I helped! :-)

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

 > It's a low-prestige task. I don't agree about the "might as well be
 > using Windows" part, though, as code is in itself the ultimate form
 > of documentation. Not very legible, but absolute.

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 ...!)

 > > So I take the easy way out ... and let them use Windows. :-(
 > 
 > Don't you have control over the hardware ecology in your home?

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. :-)

 > If you buy only compatible stuff, and everything works at home, i
 > really see no reason why they couldn't be using GNU/Linux.

In a word, Word (and Powerpoint).  LO and SO are not sufficiently good
substitutes, especially not their presentation applications.  Until 6
months ago, the spreadsheets weren't, either (they had a tendency to
lose or duplicate Japanese text in many cells for .xlsx files).  I'm
willing to fight that stuff for religious reasons, but they aren't.
(And it's questionable if I would still be willing if I didn't have
the backup of borrowing somebody else's machines with real Word ....)

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....

 > If it doesn't work elsewhere... well, tell them to hit the
 > manpages. It builds character ;)

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

Definitely gonna grow up to be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcuAkT00k0A&feature=youtu.be&t=38m18s

:-)