Comment by atomicnumber3
5 years ago
In a similar vein, I think the biggest value-add that Arch has over other distros is that it turns out having the filter of "can follow well written instructions through mildly tricky commands well enough to result in a bootable system" results in a community with a base level of competence, care, and patience that puts it at least two standard deviations above the other distros and at least four (I know how small the percentile is now) above just the general wash of garbage that you get when you Google for Windows issues.
It creates similar effects to the different credit card companies. Why would anyone accept Amex and its higher fees? Because they bring you higher value customers, sometimes dramatically higher value.
>In a similar vein, I think the biggest value-add that Arch has over other distros is that it turns out having the filter of "can follow well written instructions through mildly tricky commands
What is the value of "is competent enough to copy paste commands from a wiki?". Honestly I think the best bug reports might be because some Linux users probably understand C/C++ and can understand crash reports and error messages because they understand the system.
Because without that filter you are getting feedback from, at best, people who cannot even copy paste commands from a wiki.
You might be surprised how many people are out there which can't even read a wiki close enough to follow instructions in it.
Plus in my experience a lot of Arch users don't just "copy past instructions" they also somewhat understand why this instructions are needed, the Arch Wiki is grate as a resource for setting up things when you understand what you do, but it's often terrible when you just want a step by step guide.
Any way the main benefit of Arch is that it's close to stable upstream repose, instead of sometimes lacking not just month but even years behind wrt. the version of libraries they ship.
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That is still a pathetic filter , "I know to read and I know to copy paste", I still believer that the good reports are not from the copy-paste ,I run Arch to be cool group but from technical people that run Linux(any distro).
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> What is the value of "is competent enough to copy paste commands from a wiki?"
Very high actually. You can tell them things like "please run in debug mode" or "please run with this command line flag" or even "please change this setting and retry". Even more basic, you can tell them to restart the game/program, or to reboot their computer, and then you can trust that they actually did it.
When dealing with a regular computer user, you can't assume any of these things.
From my real world experience on making desktop apps you want to get all the bug reports from all users, so you need to make it "1 click", This means add a menu /button to submit a bug report, then you popup a form where user fills stuff, you also send the log file where you collected info live OS version and other useful stuff plus the crash logs).
Same if you need to have the user run in debug mode you make it 1 click to enable/disable debug mode, usually though developers don't work directly with customers so then they don't put the effort to streamline the collection of quality bug reports.
> What is the value of "is competent enough to copy paste commands from a wiki?".
For a while, NixOS had examples throughout its manual, in the installation section, which did not together form a usable installation script, or even snippets within one. If you read the prose in the manual and used the examples as examples in the context of the prose, you'd be fine. But if you blindly copied and pasted all of the example snippets, the install would not complete.
You can watch someone ‘get filtered’ here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QujRHErFG4w
The documentation has since been revised to make the examples copy-paste safe, which is a change I endorse because I see NixOS is a tool whose adoption I want to see grow and whose community I want to welcome and educate people rather than function as a super duper cool kids club whose that makes me feel special inside. But it does show how you could up the ante from the Arch case, if you really think exclusionary obscurantism is the way forward for projects you care about.
There is a even simpler reason:
A lot of people gaming of Linux are either software developers or system administrators.
People buying a "Linux gaming system" are the rare exception, instead it's often "buy a powerful computer for use case X, and hey why not go for a slightly better/tweaked spec and also also game on it".
> buy a powerful computer for use case X, and hey why not go for a slightly better/tweaked spec and also also game on it
I'm a programmer and this is exactly what I do.
> Why would anyone accept Amex and its higher fees? Because they bring you higher value customers, sometimes dramatically higher value.
Why are Amex customers higher value? Is it because they're typically business cards rather than personal?
> Why are Amex customers higher value? Is it because they're typically business cards rather than personal?
That's probably a part of it, but the real answer is because an Amex is a charge card, not a credit card, which means that whatever is spent on it MUST be paid off in full at the next billing cycle. The net effect of this, is that if your customers are shopping with an Amex, they're people who /have/ money, or in the case of business cards they are acting on behalf of an organization that has money. Without writing an expository essay, it seems to be simply true that those who are more affluent also have networks and can bring people by word of mouth if you meet their expectations.
Amex cards allow balances to be carried as long as a minimum is paid each month, just the same as with any other credit card. https://www.americanexpress.com/us/benefits/payment-flexibil...
The primary reason Amex customers are more valuable is because most Amex cards carry an annual fee, which only more affluent folks can afford.
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WSL is somewhat similar in that installing it was harder than installing most other things on Windows. They've made it easier in Windows 11, and will probably continue that direction. I wonder if MS knows where that leads for them.
You can literally just do `wsl.exe --install` on the newest builds of Windows 10 and it enables the hypervisor feature and downloads Ubuntu in one command. AFAIK it's the same in Windows 11 (I'm still on 10 and don't plan on upgrading for a few years at least).
Yes, as I mentioned, they made it easier only very recently. 09/27/2021, actually. And you still have to open cmd.exe or powershell with "run as admin". It is not as easy as installing, say, GitBash.
Also, some things are still under documented, or hard to do. Like that "wslg.exe" can be used to make Windows shortcuts to launch graphical programs. Or how to make various systemd things work (pid 1 is not systemd), and so on. Or how to add all the Windows fonts to the Linux distro. I'm saying they will likely improve all this over time.