[Wine] How can we improve WNE?

tparker tparker at etherstorm.net
Wed Apr 8 17:30:04 CDT 2009


fcmartins wrote:
> James, I fully share your viewpoint, but I have to disagree with the use of the word "idiots"

I will chime in as an idiot who often has to come to the list to beg for 
ideas to fix problems that, to those with the knowledge, are trivial.

When it comes down to it, I am an end user. I use my computer for basic 
things - email, web browsing, TV shows, music, and video games. Those 
are the same things I used Windows for. I never did anything in Windows 
that made me have to learn about the actual software workings of the 
computer and when something doesn't work in Linux I have absolutely no 
frame of reference to fall back on or compare things to in order to fix 
the problem. People say 'regedit is the same as in Windows' but that 
doesn't help someone who never used it there. :)

Then once the problem is fixed it all works great until I update 
something. I may need the same fix after the update as I had used 
before, but it's several months later and I no longer remember anything 
about what to do, so I have to ask again. The forum has been a huge help 
with this since I can now go there and search for the old fix but it 
does still happen for questions asked pre-forum.
> the users might just be ignorant  
This is often the case, even for those of us who try the db, google, and 
other forums for answers before asking for help. Often times we find 
just enough information to tell us what the problem is, but not enough 
to tell us how to fix it.  To quote man_in_shack's earlier post:

"Then either the instructions are flawed or the user is beyond hope."

I run into flawed instructions very often as a newbie. Okay, flawed may 
not be the correct term, maybe 'not specific enough'. Sometimes a fix 
will say "edit Y file and add Z", but I don't know how to find Y file 
and when I do find it I don't know what part of the many lines in it to 
add Z to. I have often broken my computer trying to follow directions 
that were just shy of specific enough for an uneducated (in computers) 
user. When I find someone who knows more than I to help me fix it they 
ask why the heck I did something so stupid and the answer usually is 
that I didn't know better.

Searches often fail because I know what I need to find, but may not know 
the best key words to search for, so I end up spending an hour reading 
through stuff I don't need and grabbing terms from those pages to refine 
my search enough that I can hopefully get to what I do need. By the time 
I give up and post for help I am so confused that I'm not even sure how 
to word what I need anymore.

The above quote was referring to regedit. For me the Useful Registry 
Keys instructions took about thirty minutes of google searches and 
webpage reading before I could even start following them. Most of the 
time was going through the pages to find one in dummy speak to tell me 
what regedit even was so I could figure out if I needed to try it. Then 
trying to learn enough to know what keys in the list I should try.

This has also been improved as more detailed instructions are added to 
the wiki, hopefully that continues. I live in dread of having to update 
my wine again, my currently stable install is from a wine-git that took 
me 3 days of tears and caffeine to figure out and even with the notes I 
took along the way and I know that I can not repeat the steps without help.

Idiots may be a bit harsh, but I can't say it's always wrong either. 
Particularly when used by someone who spends a great deal of time saying 
the same things over and over as each new person runs into a problem 
that needs the same fix someone else needed last week. Even though I 
know the people who cut me off on the highway each day aren't all 
idiots, I still call them all that after it happens enough times. :)



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