thelinuxlink.net

OK, as some of you may know, I'm distro shopping for a good lappy based distro for my wife that I can also stand to use. I've been looking at pclinuxos and have installed and fiddled with their most recent RC (.94/2007 IIRC). In any case, I've been lurking over at their forums for a while, and I keep running into this certain kind of thread, one that reminds me greatly of the ubuntu fora. A person comes along and asks a question, and instead of being given an answer, about 10 people who don't know the answer chime in with opinions, some of which are flat out non-sequitur (and BS to boot). I can hang out in newb forums all day and enjoy it - the newb corner on the arch fora, for instance, are fine - I don't mind answering the same beginner questions over and over, and in fact sometimes enjoy it. For some reason, though, this variety of friendly but misguided piling on just irks me. Please read through these threads and tell me whether I'm nuts, sane, or just an asshole. If your vote is that I'm an asshole, how do you approach these sorts of threads?

http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=19584.0
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=19950.0

In my opinion, there are two sides to this coin.

Over on the Mandriva forums, usually you don't get too many responses like that. However, you'll sometimes see newbies getting upset that no-one is answering their posts... feeling like they're being ignored and the community is "unfriendly". Of course, this isn't the case; it's just that no-one has anything useful to contribute to solve the problem.

Then, you have what you're seeing on the PCLOS forums, people not knowing how to solve the problem but aswering anyway so the person asking the question doesn't feel ignored.

I don't know what the best way to handle this situation is. Filling the thread with a bunch of "don't know"s doesnt' seem to be beneficial either.

Several of those posts were anything but ideal, but didn't seem much different than what you find on most forums, in my opinion. Except for the one going on about a fan and pipes as a contraption to cool his laptop. That was pretty funny, though.

Thanks for your input guys - I suppose the Arch forums and this place have spoiled me. I guess I just get bent when I see that sort of overgenerosity of opinion with lack of clue attached. I was going to try to help the poor guy with the swap issue (who has been told that he needs to reinstall because swap stopped working and because he made some very minor adjustments to fstab - WTF???) but I haven't been approved for the forums yet. I guess I'll just give the forums a miss...