Well, most of you know me and therefore know precisely, that I do not like to close any comment, thread or whatever. Everyone has a right to their opinion. I only do it if it is absolutely necessary.
That’s why I am giving this thread a final chance: please keep the discussion about the original topic.
Don’t overdo political conversations, or else they turn into timewastes, like the one initiated by @atto.
" I cannot imagine Trump making anything or inventing something that could be monetized and giving it away for free" … I hope not! We need business people and entrepreneurs who are creating businesses, jobs, and most importantly - profits!
Sounds like a great idea!
But why did you make five more posts afterwards, all completely unrelated to the topics you mention?
I have to say, I was glad when you started this thread, as it was a welcome opportunity for me to share my own discomfort about dialogue culture in the IT world. However, as much as you try to throw baits with, say, the Obama birth, I won’t follow up on them.
I consider this trolling. Please, look up the term should you not be familiar with it.
I shall still answer your personal attacks on me but frankly, I’m very inclined to ignore any future posts by you.
You are free to check out my profile in this forum. In all modesty, I believe, I have provided at least some useful advice to people looking for help.
Can you say the same?
As far as I know, Linux Mint is a community of lovely people who dedicate their time and knowledge to provide others with a very user-friendly Linux experience.
If I hadn’t already found my “home” elsewhere, Mint would be one of my top choices.
The best way to interact with the community (there is no “owner”), is to use the official Linux Mint forums.
I sincerely doubt that Mr. Torvalds has the time and the patience to deal personally with any person feeling some discontent about some statement he might have made at some point in time. However, you could still learn C, improve your skills, become a skilled developer and then join the kernel developer community. After having made some meaningful contributions, I bet, he’s going to listen to your complaints.
I wonder how you could read this into my comments. I’d be grateful for clarification or was it just because I mentioned women and blacks? Should the latter be the case, I regret to inform you that acknowledging the existence of these demographic groups is in no way intended to hurt anybody not belonging to either of them.
There is a term for people who feel insulted by other’s statements which are not compliant with their world view: snowflakism
If this is a serious question, please take the time to read the links about the Linux code of conduct and the urban legends around the controversies about it which I provided in an earlier comment.
In German, we have a saying: “Wer lesen kann, ist klar im Vorteil” which roughly translates to “Being able to read, is always an advantage”.
I’m a long time user of Linux Mint and of their Forums. Never had a problem with rudeness sorry the original poster has. There are always a few in every bunch. But most of those on the forum are there to try and help others use their systems to the best of their abilities.
None of them is paid for their efforts to help. And there is a wide range of expertise so not all answers may be helpful. But on the whole Mint and Mint forums are wonderful examples of trying to help everyone who chooses to use them get the best results possible. No forum or operating system is perfect because the people involved are not perfect. Best advise ignore the rude ones an go on with business.
LOL that rules out donald then he couldn’t even manage to make money out of losers or gamblers as they like to be called
HAHA whatever. You live in your own mental world. The rest of us live in the world of profits. And we do just fine.
I just came across this thread, which is a bit distressing. I agree with the usual rule (that same that used to apply in British pubs) that politics, religion, as well as currently sensitive issues (BAME, respect for women…) should not be discussed in forums that are essentially technical. Perhaps brief mentions, though not long tracts and polemics, might be acceptable in these stressful times.
A related subject is rudeness related to feelings of technical superiority. I no longer read posts on the Stack Exchange group of forums, where people who have accumulated a certain number of “merit” points can engage in bullying and other forms of impoliteness, including deleting other contributors’ posts.
That contrasts with the social medium ResearchGate (because of its purpose you have to apply for membership): people who ask what appear to beginners questions can sometimes be rewarded with a series of polite and studied replies that amount to a complete tutorial.
To return to Mint, may I discuss your comment: “Anyway, I want Linux Mint to excel with customer service. I have this post because I know Linux Mint is excellent and I want people to enjoy it! You can run Windows games in Steam…”? In other posts I’ve mentioned customer service, which starts with finding out what customers don’t like, or think they need when they have tried the product. Basically, the FOSS/Linux scene needs to pay more attention to this. I think the model (however users pay for it) does need more political and commercial input, and we ought to be discussing this more. In particular, apart from the Municipality of Munich, I’ve seen no European political instance that has taken the slightest interest in this strategic matter. I agree with the view that monopoly situations are damaging, particularly for the holders of the monopolies. Powerful supra-national organisations like the EU should be doing more to improve things.
Maintaining and updating software is an aspect that is slowly (if confusingly) getting much better. But one specific instance might help explain the current dilemma. A friend has been using a version of the popular game Scrabble since it was introduced in 2009. Because of her age, she (like me soon…) can’t adapt to newer versions. It’s compatible only with versions of Windows up to Vista (and perhaps 7), so we bought a computer specifically to run the game under Wine. I installed Mint 20 since I’ve used it at home and at our walk-in free repair shop for several years. However, it seems to be exceedingly difficult to use Wine with Mint 20 - and I found no useful advice on the forums. Perhaps the Mint people were unaware that many “customers” install Linux because of Wine. In the end I installed the Ubuntu GamePack distro; this worked first try with our game, but for other uses of the computer there’s a small learning curve we didn’t really want. GamePack comes from the Ukraine, providing an insight into the interesting variety of approaches from different countries that all those distros can provide. There’s a nice weather application built-in, but we failed to move its location to France, where we have plenty of the other kind of wine!
Thank you for the post, it is interesting. I agree with pretty much all points (which only happens very rarely).
Allow me to cherry pick one specific part, I can relate to the most:
I have experienced this, for a looooong time. I am also extremely aggravated by this for the same amount of time!
StackExchange or, usually known under the name StackOverflow, even though that’s now only a part of StackExchange, is filled with elitist pricks. I cannot find a milder word!
While that is true, I have a love/hate relationship with it. I have seen a lot of nice questions and nice answers, which help A LOT, when you are stuck developing something, or fixing something on Linux. It’s worth gold!
However, most of the time, I see questions, that are being rudely commented on or sometimes even rudely answered. I have seen so many high point amount holders that just comment how bad the question is or whatever. I think even comments like “reported this as duplicate” are extremely annoying and honestly my intuitive reaction is always a nuclear facepalm when I read this, because every problem, even if on the surface the same, can still be different for each computer. Additionally, such comments are not helpful at all. They are sometimes even counter-productive due to them being annoying from their roots up to the leaves! The Ubuntu OS on your machine might be completely different from mine. Just because you are using the same OS as me, does not mean our problems are duplicates of each other.
I could go on and on with such examples… I could write a whole book about them. However, I want to shorten it and just give another single example.
Some elitist pricks say always something like “oh it’s in the manual on page 594, paragraph 6.7b”. They say it to make the one who created the question seem like they did not search thoroughly enough or something like that. Basically, they (again) want to make them look bad. However, they do not want to think about the fact, that perhaps the question is there, because the manual is so horrendously written and also so huge, that it is hard to find whatever you are looking for! So instead of blaming the human who can’t just read a huge and horrible manual just for a single thing they have to know, the manual should be blamed – but behold – the computer and manual is never at fault. Humans are just too stupid! (Says the typical anti-social elitist prick on StackOverflow.)
All that said, I want to explain my conclusion in short:
There is a reason for the point system to be there. There is a reason for these strict rules. It is related to quality answers, quality questions and keeping the overall quality of pretty much everything high. However, there is a huge bug in the late game. Once you get enough points, you get pretty much OP in this point game and you can de facto (after a certain threshold) do whatever the fuck you want. (Ironically it’s like with huge companies. Back then, when they were forced to, Apple made extremely great products to get to the top. Now they are at the top and don’t give a fuck about their customers anymore, because they will stay at the top, no matter what. They could literally put cow shit in their laptops and hipsters would still buy it and call it art or whatever.) So you first are nice and fine, gather thousands of points and then you just become the rudest prick of all and nobody cares, not even you. Why? Because you have what seems like a trillion points on Stackoverflow and even if your rude answer gets downvoted a 1000 times, you won’t even notice your abbreviated score next to your name change.
P.S.:
I cannot not mention this! I have to bring another huge example that is one of the worst things I encounter on StackExchange. I am pretty sure, this is the most frustrating thing every user experiences at some point:
There are so many elitist pricks that just downvote questions and answers that are missing a little detail or aren’t “perfect” according to the standard of a professional IT engineer with 20 years of work experience.
I have seen so many questions and answers of other people being downvoted like that and they had no idea why. This even happened to me a couple of times. I always ask in the comments: why is my question/answer downvoted? I am curious about what I could improve.
NOT EVEN A SINGLE PERSON OF THOSE WHO DOWNVOTED HAS ANSWERED THIS QUESTION!
Well, actually there was a single dude who answered this question. He said, that what I am looking for is in the manual. Then I had to repeat a part of my question to show him, that my specific situation wasn’t generic enough, so the manual, even though I read the necessary part, did not help, because, as mentioned, my situation was quite special and you can’t just look in the manual about it and that’s it.
Now the funny part: the dude who answered wasn’t actually the one who downvoted. So the initial claim still holds true; not even a single person of those who downvoted an answer or question answered my question regarding improvements, etc.
P.P.S.:
Due to all this I am done with StackExchange overall, regarding asking questions. I only look up answers that I need. I do not post questions anymore.
If I post a question anywhere on StackExchange again, I am so desparate, that I literally see no other way of getting the information I need, at all. I have to be extremely frustrated and desparate to arrive at such a low point, that I would even go back to StackExchange.
Very interesting post! Thank you.
I have to admit that I never actively participated in this forum. However, I find it an incredibly rich source of knowledge, especially when it comes to C++ and JavaScript programming.
I have actively participated in the Perl Monks forum, in lack of a Perl Nuns forum but the general invisibility of women in MINT professions is an entirely different subject. The people are pretty helpful there, but they very much insist on a certain style of communication which might not be everybody’s cup of tea. If you fail to follow the general tone, you are likely to get rather harsh answers. Didn’t happen to me but I have seen it.
The nicest developers’ community I found until today is the one for PHP. People are incredibly helpful and hardly any question is deemed too stupid. Might be, because the general IT crowd doesn’t consider PHP developers to be Real Programmers.
I find it very hard to demand customer service when you are essentially getting a free product. On the other hand, the community based approach actually often leads to better responses than in the realm of commercial products. Do commercial manufacturers or companies really give a damn about the wishes and needs of their customers? Unless we’re talking about huge corporate clients, I don’t really think so.
I couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately, the Munich project has been given up, I presume because it was some kind of premature when it was initiated. However, now I don’t see any technical reason why any given entity couldn’t switch their entire IT to Linux but, alas, big corporations are pretty good at lobbying and with their financial resources, they will always find a way to convince the people in charge of taking decisions that only a commercial solution will provide them with the performance and security they need.
Is this so? I never felt the inclination or need to use it. I originally came to Linux because I needed LaTeX for my mathematical papers and in Linux it all worked out of the box whilst (back then, not now any more) under Windows, it was real pain in the ass to get it to run properly.
I find it very hard to demand customer service when you are essentially getting a free product. On the other hand, the community based approach actually often leads to better responses than in the realm of commercial products.
My argument is that, taking “free” to mean “independent of monopoly powers”, we need a different model that does allow people or agencies to pay something, part of the money going to efforts to apply existing commercial know-how to find out what is needed. Developers, and more broadly researchers and engineers, don’t necessarily know how to do that. I mentioned “agencies” because some kind of organisation will be needed to make offerings with visible financing available to people and countries that don’t have much money. The investment would be peanuts to the EU or a UN entity compared to the benefits, bearing in mind the price of the “monopoly” software.
On the subject of simple transactions between user and supplier, QtiPlot circumvents the FOSS “rule” by offering a choice between a service contract and compiling the source code yourself.
Consideration for customers: I discovered another example of how not to do it: Ubuntu GamePack, following plain Ubuntu, has its desktop wallpaper images stored deep in the system where highly privileged access is required - sudo gets you nowhere and none of the forum replies to users’ complaints led me to a solution. You can put your images in the user area, from where they can easily be deleted accidentally. More shocking is that plain backgrounds that don’t have to be constructed as image files have been banned. The developers should have thought in particular of users with visual impairements, for whom visual distractions must be kept to the minimum.
Is this so? I never felt the inclination or need to use it.
Computers, like (for example) office software can be used for many things. Gaming on Linux via Wine appears to be big, with games old and new. The GamePack distro I mention provides one indication of that. Furthermore, it advertises CrossOver software, for which people seem willing to pay what seems to me quite a lot of money. I submitted my Scrabble problem to them and it’s now on their list: https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/scrabble-2009-edition
Not all of us play games, but this emphasises the need for a successful alternative OS and ecosystem to nurture sources of income by determining and accommodating the full range of tastes and requirements.
Thanks @tapkennedy indeed LOL 
Trump companies that sought bankruptcy protection even though he has a very, very, very large brain – everyone knows that…. Watch the video
Workers and contractors unpaid 
ps why does he keep repeating words and sentences? Is this a known mental disorder?
This is indeed a well known affliction called Foghorn Leghorn Syndrome. Sufferers are stupid, incompetent, racist, greedy, cowardly, vulgar uncouth maladjusted miscontents, calling people “boy” and trying to imitate pale shadows of real people. They attract people of similar intellect and character and they love shouting and blaming other people for their mistakes.
Funny enough they easy to subdue with a few words like “military service” “tax fraud” and “you the defendant”
Relevant to my rant about support, control and funding is the news that Mozilla’s Firefox is in trouble. This is the default browser in many Linux distros and it’s easy to see why. I don’t know what alternatives of similar performance are available, or whether Firefox can be forked or taken in charge by someone else.
I count browsers with the PC BIOS, at least one operating system, and a World-wide email system, as items that should be available to everyone with no dependence on or interference by individuals or companies. There should be no possibility of browsing and mailing getting contaminated with links to data scraping and analysis activities, which currently appear to be the main source of finance for their owners (including Mozilla).
I guess I’m talking (as others have done) partly about human rights, though apart from the right to privacy they may not be on the same level as the fundamental ones. The question is whether supranational or philanthropic organisations should influence or get involved in the design and provision of those informatics facilities that are used in one way or another by nearly everyone. You can find discussions of what rules should exist for enforcing privacy and so on, but it’s largely a matter of fighting against existing abuses rather than thinking up something new.
https://www.gilc.nl/privacy/survey/intro.html
Hey @crl I hear what you say even though I am not a gamer myself. Though – to comply with Akito’s instruction – I will be a little “rude” like mint forum but tongue in cheek…!
What……? Have you not read the almost daily reports on our community pages with minty problems? 
Those of you who are into mainstream “Linux” distros like Mint and say - think……
…. may have missed these orgs engaged with your rightful concerns
I am not a gnulinux FsF purist and use windows programmes under wine but do try to educate myself with native programmes. I have very few problems with wine and accept it as being a workaround enabling me to use some great windows Serif programmes to get the job done in a well practiced manner since way back when; as old install CD’s say Win95 ready!
Did I mention the Half-Wit 
and mint forum nasties – Oooops! 
He, after reported threats of job loss, to the regulator’s chief Stephen Hahn is now claiming USA credit for the vaccine from the German company Biontech and its founder scientists married couple Şahin and Özlem Türeci, and oncologist Christoph Huber. Şahin and Özlem Türeci are both children of Turkish families who moved to Germany whilst I think Huber is Austrian. The company initially snubbed the 
House invitation to (vaccine) Operation Warp Speed and received no monies from Trump administration. Credit where credit is due – think of Biontech as the 
gnu-linux of the mega medicine-drug world.
I created this account to reply to this. I agree that they are rude, because I had an account there.
When I joined the forums, I found out some people were friendly.
Later on, I found some rude people.
I see the same problem with Manjaro forums, some of them are rude, when I asked a question about desktop environments. At least, one helped me.
I think this is also related to the type of person. I assume, there is a type of person that first of all is pretty negative and perhaps rude, but also likes to stay on e.g. a forum to “teach” people and newcomers how to live, or whatever. So I just find it natural that this type of people is spread across fora, because they happen to like staying on their “personal” forum for, what seems like, forever.
At least, that’s how I explain to myself how almost all rude people I met on fora have extremely high amount of forum points (or whichever type of measurement they are using on the particular forum).
Hey, at least I am a positive example. I am not only rude when having many points, I also am rude when being completely new to a forum! Perhaps that makes me a better bad influence in a forum. 
Oh! I haven’t noticed yet. 