It's hellishly difficult with the furry paws, too!

First off, a huge thanks to everyone who's taken this seriously. I know I'm just slow off the mark with this and eventually if I choose an n900 will get up to speed. I think part of the problem lies with the complex way the OS community works.

Take symbian:
1) I read the manual and that will take me through all the basic functions
2) If I want something beyond, I hit google and find the relevent software paid or free, and install it.

Before deciding whether what I want is a symbian phone I can do a straightforward search on whether or not there are apps to do what I want, and if the answer's 'no' I look for something else. For example, the other possible choice for me is a satio (symbian). So I've already found someone assuring me that e-reader s60v3 runs on s60v5, and the guys at Olive Tree have the software for s60v5 currently in final beta testing.

When I try to do that for maemo, I find myself surrounded by people talking language I don't understand, and often arguing with each other (I loved the description of 'religious wars'). For example, I want to run office software: I've seen stuff that says doc-to-go runs - with, or without a claim that's it's view only. I've seen suggestions for something called KOffice. And I've even seen people who claim to be running OpenOffice. Which has left me utterly bewildered, and uncertain.

(I'm not asking you to answer that in this thread - just using it as an illustration... I have a bunch of questions like that.)

What us poor Bears of Little Brain needs is somewhere we can ask stuff like that and get nice easy answers in short words so:

Yes, you can d/l doc-to-go and run it from here but as yet that's only a viewer. (You can pay for the upgrade to full function)
Yes, you can d/l KOffice from here and the website for its creator is here, which will explain its finctions more fully
Yes you can run Open Office but to do that, you need to do this and this first: walk through here...

I'm only guessing at those answers, BTW!!!!

Your wiki is lovely and helpful but it still doesn't have answers to many of my questions. I feel like I need a tame 'expert' willing to sit down with me for half an hour and address my issues so i can make an informed choice.

I really, really don't want to fall back to the 'default position' of buying what I know (not least because of SE's sadim touch last year - that's Midas backwards). I want to make the n900 meet enough of my needs to be worth buying. Cos the whole idea is a heck of a lot more exciting to us bears. We like Open, Co-operative, etc!

PS I don't mind chaperoning other bears if I can find answers!

what does it take to get editing permissions for those pages?

i totally agree that the intro could be more noob-friendly, not full of complex schematics concerning software development.

Let's try: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...908#post340908

The intro could be also a wiki page, but let's not diverge in this thread.

Great idea. Would it be asking too much if posts quoting a question (to give an answer) were referenced in the post they are quoting (containing the question)?

That way you would see directly in a post which posts later on quotes it, so you see which questions are answered and where the answers are (Q&A threads might get big over time, lots to sift through for an answer..). Might actually be useful in ordinary threads as well..

I've not seen that in any forum that I've used, but that does sound like a useful feature. In the meantime, I guess the only way to deal with this would be for someone to manually go through the thread and weed things out, or edit a first post, or a wiki page or similar.

Good idea... Do you think many users will do this though?

The posts need to be edited by the posters themselves.

Given that the type of user asking the questions is a new user, no, I can't imagine most of them bothering to go back to edit their post once their question is answered.

To edit other people's posts would need a forum moderator, or a volunteer who could edit one particular post that they created (e.g. your post at the top of the thread could contain the questions and answered copied and pasted in - not that I expect you will have time for this!) or a similar wiki page that could be edited by anyone with the questions and answers. The problem after a while is that the lists of Q&As will get longer and longer, and will need to be categorised (hardware, OS, multimedia etc.) to be easy to navigate.

Well there should be forum software to take care of this (c.f. threaded view), since there is a natural link between the quoting post and the quoted post. When poster quotes a post, add link to new post's number (the # in the top right corner of each post) to the old post.

Each post could contain this:
Quoting posts:
#4
#75
#82
(formatted in a nice way, there should be space for this)

So what I mean is to implement the feature in the forum, not require each poster or a moderator to do it manually.

Let me pose something for the Board to consider.

Maemo.org is, to quote the introduction: "The Home of the Maemo Community . . . an open source community developing software around the Maemo platform."

The n00bs we are talking about are, on the whole, never going to develop software. We are users of Maemo and Maemo.org developed applications.

Perhaps we need a better way to divide up the developer community and the user community so that the former can help the latter in their forums but the latter doesn't clog up the former's forums with simple questions. This may be a matter of reorganizing and reordering the forums in Talk. Perhaps what I assume was the old segmentation of maemo.org and internettablettalk.com forums could be revisited (perhaps with the user forums in internettablettalk mirrored in maemo.org but with the developer forums only in maemo.org). Maybe (if the board software permits it) you can read all the forums but you can only post in the Newbie forum until you have X number of posts.

I don't know the answer. I also don't know the history which led to the decisions that have been made. But if you want to advance the cause of Maemo and the N900, it would be good to reduce the frustration level of new users.

Splitting up developer / user is a fine idea, and there is already garage.maemo.org and the developer mailing list so I think that split has / could easily be achieved. Perhaps the split is user vs. power user?

Also, I agree that the search is really terrible, even with advanced search.

For questions like "which software does X" or "how do I ..." , I suggest a "yahoo answers" or "stack overflow" format instead of a message board. Many threads tend to veer way off course which seems to be why we get 500 post threads, and good luck trying to enforce otherwise.