A rant about Official documentation & MS & min.specs

[Tom Davies]

Hi :)
Possibly it is too hot here and i'm having a "bad hair day".  Please don't anyone take this personally it's just a rant about the unfairness of the world in general 



<a rant about official documentation>


Official documentation can be really annoying.  The official page showing the "minimum
specification" that Ubuntu can run on is sooo low that almost none but
the most advanced users can get Ubuntu running at all let alone
satisfactorily.  Most people that start with Ubuntu are not
Gnu&Linux experts so they find that Ubuntu wont work on their
machine with 2Kb of Ram and then say that means that Ubuntu doesn't work and that
Gnu&Linux never works.  





Of course MS makes outrageously low claims for Xp too but with that
people don't expect it to work unless they have far MORE than the
min.spec.  For some weird reason people expect Ubuntu to work with far
less than the min.spec.  





That adds to the general "blame the user" attitude in the Windows world.  After all it's  corporate OS right?  So it couldn't possibly go wrong
unless the customer stuffs it up could it?  Lol.  By contrast people don't
expect a "hobbyists, community thing" to work so if they do something
really dumb then they blame the project rather than themselves.  If it goes wrong it proves to them what they had already decided before trying it.  



</a rant about official documentation>

When i first tried Ubuntu i somehow stumbled onto the community docs page and despaired slightly that my machine was only just over the min.spec quoted there.  So, I didn't think it stood a chance.  My neighbour installed it and to my amazement it flew.

I think giving people false expectations is damaging and we should really quote min spec as something like this or higher
10 Gb hard-drive space  (Xp quotes lower but most people know it's uncomfortable with less than 30GB and 20% of that being free-space)
2 Gb Ram (people will read that and then try it on machines with only 1Gb.  If we wrote 500Mb they expect it to work on 256Mb ram)
1.6 GHz cpu (again people will try it on a lot less expecting it to work)

Regards from
Tom :)


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