Re: Charity PCs
Things like when the updater stops working. I've elicited that on about half a dozen distros/versions over the last three or four years. Had it on one where the updater was broken from the start and the first thing you had to do was update the updater, i.e. use the CL.
I guess we can assume that PCs supplied with Linux will come with network adapter's that do work from the off, as opposed to; after lots of under-the-bonnet stuff by someone who knows what they're doing, or, simply; can't get it to work, ever.
And, I'll tell you, most of the time you don't half have to do some searching to find the fix for these things. They're never addressed in the official documentation or the site of the distro; they are never addressed as bugs, only reported as such; the only way you find fixes are in forums; in forums you usually have to read page after page after page of postings in two, three, four forums until you find the fix that does work, and more often than not it's a link to the web-site of some guy who has done far more on this than anyone officially connected with the distro. At that point you quite possibly have to download a file or files from another site to perform the fix and you _definitely_ have to go CL from this point in. It sure helps if you've done it before! Like, say, been using Windows since MS-DOS was a familiar component of it. And this almost certainly won't involve _just_ using the CL, like updating via it; it will involve editing executable text files or similar.
Lots and lots of occasions where stopping something mid-way - because it is going to take far longer than you've got - and stopping it breaks it. Things like you can't reboot, you have to reset and when the desktop comes back up the broken thing is still there, and you still can't shut it down. Re-installing as an update doesn't fix it, so re-installing from scratch requires - if the broken module/app/whatever happened after updating the system, on re-installation it has to be updated again and on broadband can take a couple of hours - while if the broken thing is the updater itself or something of similar criticality simply re-installing is no fix whatsoever.
And when you get response after response after indignant, not to say offensive response to comments like this one from the 'bois, the one thing you can take from it is the knowledge they're talking out of their arses.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
