This is true. I've used Linux for the past 10-odd years, so when it breaks I'm off into the terminal without a second thought, or I'll spend half an hour fiddling on the Internet looking for the answers.

And most of the time this works quite nicely... for me.

But god, imagine the regular end users doing this. Look at all the whining and griping when the repositories went down during the OS2008 release. We, "enlightened" people knew to turn our tablets off and do something else for a few days, then turn them back on and try again.

The regular end users aren't stupid, as such. They're just not interested in what goes on inside their devices. Installing applications shouldn't take more than a few clicks to do really, should it? We're only installing stuff, not compiling it from source. This is 2008 Linux in a mass-consumer device created by a mobile phone manufacturer, not 1994 Linux hand hacked together from Linus' own sweat.

From reading this forum it seems the problem consists of two things:

* New users not knowing where to find help
* New users confusing this place with somewhere to moan and vent their frustrations (which is fair, you go and spend £250 on something that doesn't work as you'd expect without some confusing and technical fiddling. It'd be like buying a new car and realising you need to fit all the lightbulbs and battery yourself, but only after some smug car owner has pointed this out to you in a "you're a bit thick for not knowing what a screwdriver does" way)

I think it'd help if there were some nicely printed and simply worded documentation included in the box that tells new users where to go for help, basic terminology, nice places to visit on the Internet and more importantly - how to politely ask for help. After all, being rude to newbies is a bit like kicking your puppy when it pees on the carpet - it doesn't know any better.

Once we've got that we can give constructive "RTFM, Page 6. Come back and ask questions if you get stuck" type answers, rather than the utterly pointless and unhelpful "Go search the forum it's been asked before".

It'd also be great if these types of threads didn't turn into a Linux/Windows OS war. They were boring and tedious in 1997