On 2025-07-14, Nicolas George <[email protected]> wrote: > Greg (HE12025-07-12): >> That's fine as long as you realize you are in the vast minority. > > As long as you acknowledge that not being in the majority is not a flaw > in any way…
I do completely acknowledge that. >> The thrust of the OP seems to be directed towards the *majority* of >> *new* users, who ain't gonna be using Gnus to read this mailing list, >> please get real. > > So, you would have a webforum with new users asking questions and > experienced users who could give answers still on the mailing-list. There is such a thing as an irresolvable problem. I think new users likely to be using desktop environments, whereas the old dinosaurs hold them in a certain disdain. It is also possible a new user might not know how to use or navigate a mailing list. Anyway, everything's simple as pie once you know how to do it. Getting from here to there is left as an exercise many people don't have the time or the inclination to take. Some people simply aren't interested in the topic of computers in the same way they're not interested in the mechanics of internal-combustion engines. They buy the car and when it's broken they go to Joe's Automotive in Culver City. > Is it a underhanded plan to have the experienced users quietly by > themselves? I think that's already happened, more or less. The issue is that to get my wife to use Debian it would need to be preinstalled on new machines for sale, updates would have to be performed seamlessly in the background, she'd have to know beforehand she'd be getting her Libreoffice and Thunderbird and Firefox and that a default desktop environment would be installed geared to the technical specs of her machine. But this goes against the whole of philosophy of taking control and responsibility for your computing, which is the seminal inspiration for Linux in the first place. As an aside, as I think you're French and work for the SNCF, my leftist beaux-parents, now defunct, took a weird kind of pride (because it demonstrated somehow that they were humanists) in *not* knowing or *refusing* to know how their Freebox functioned and spent months without TV (back in the days of ADSL) until I came over one time and unplugged and replugged the thing five times (like it said in the mode d'emploi). They weren't stupid. How can you explain such a thing?
