Ubuntu – Help files written by geeks for geeks
I recently got a NAS server and tried to map a network drive in Ubuntu. I was very happy about it and wanted to automate the mounting of the network shares. As there’s no GUI for doing this – or even a simple way as Windows has, the “map network drive” command – I had to go to the console.
So I asked for help through the almighty Google. I found this wiki page, this forum thread and this help page. The help page is the hardest to understand. It looks like it was written by geeks for geeks. It seems that the open source community hasn’t yet learned a valuable lesson: not everyone has your experience when it comes to configuring servers, writing bash scripts or whatever.
posted: 10 March 19
under: open source, Personal, Ubuntu
I see this complaint a lot, and you’re totally correct.
And I see the problem going deeper than “not everyone has your experience” and gets into “not everyone wants your experience” – this kind of thing should just be simpler, or documented in a simpler way. Even worse, when things get quickly over-technical people without the expertise just end up blindly plopping things in their fstab (or where ever) and “hoping it works” – possibly causing a mess, especially during upgrades.
On the flip side, writing good documentation is very, very hard. If you end up acquiring the skills to get everything working I’d strongly suggest you take notes and contribute back to the documentation to clear up what was unclear to you as a new user
Frequently the people who are writing this are very technical and they simply don’t see the omissions that make it difficult for new users.
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