If it means not having to answer the same basic questions over and over again, then I'm all for keeping Linux a niche market.

So what happens when it is the questions you are asking that people don't want to answer?

You go figure out the answer on your own.

As long as it is constrained to people who actually want technical competence, they will see many troubles not only as something they need fixed, but as something they don't know how to fix yet, and want the knowledge worse than the fix. So they'll research (and/or just think, sometimes) before posting, because that will go farther to their goal. When all you want is a quick fix, it's often easiest to ask first, as someone will probably give you the answer, or at least point you much more specifically toward the answer. You just won't get a good understanding of the system that allows you to fix the next problem yourself.

So there won't be near as many questions , and the situation where nobody knows the answer becomes more prevalent than that where everyone's tired of telling the answer.

So basically it's best to continue just as a 'hobby' thing..? Nobody is paying for it, so everyone keep their day job and work on this when they can and when they feel like it?
Or the occasional antisocial coder w/ no life who dedicates everything to tech (reiser?)?

No, you leave the de-niching to people who are getting paid to do it; that's Novell, Red hat, etc..
Or to the complete *****s who actually do it on a volunteer basis; that's Ubuntu, etc..

But, yes, it's best for us if as far as we're concerned it stays niche. Leave the consumerification of UNIX to Apple; they like it.

Excelent. Like the anti-science. Standing on the toes of giants.
Instead of progressing technology, everyone spends time doing the same thing over and over again out of fear of looking like a newbie.

Which is I guess an reasonable description of how linux appears from the outside.

However, regardless to 'ego linux' distributions, it would be nice to have some sort of distribution that was good for normal people so they don't have to keep funding microsofts desire to copyright everything in computer technology. I suppose that is where ubuntus market is and it has made very impressive progress so far, to the point that there is a linux that is close to something those normal people can use.

Everyone looks stuff up in the manual, out of fear of looking like a newbie? Well, I don't think that's why, but any reason's a good reason. I think it has more to do with wanting to learn, and recognizing that a man page is a much better way of understanding grep than a single regex someone responds to your specific "help me please" question with.

(And what's this mean: "Instead of progressing technology"? Do you think that the people who ask dumb questions instead of Ring TFM are likely to bring about any technological progress? Or am I misunderstanding your point?)

...and, just as a side point, let me say this: if anyone reading this thread is (or should be) considered a "newbie", then you would do well to learn (via which, you will learn to love) regular expressions. O'Reilly has a (big, and somewhat expensive, but definitely worthwhile) book on the subject.

regex will, more than anything else in unix/linux-dom, move you well along the path out of newbie-ness and into power-user-hood.

one question here is how to measure progress in technology, words like innovation and similar are thrown around so often now that its become more or less meaningless...

i say, progress is a evolutionary process, not a revolutionary one...

Progress is an evolutionary process, and evolution does kill off a lot of the branches, especially if other things are evolving faster.