Hye,

i'm reading LQ multiple times per day and i'm very pleased about this forum.

I am not sure if this will describe my perception, because English is not my native language. Also it should not be seen as any kind of trolling. So hopefully people will excuse me if i'm not able to explain here as good as and native speaker.

For months i'm thinking to write about the suggestions i found here on a large amount of all installation/hardware configuration issues posted here, and i'm a little bit astonished about this.

So the point i am confused on is, that if someone has problems during/after installation or in configuring hardware on his computers, a lot of users come up with "try this distro" or "try that distro".

From my point of view Linux is Linux. It is a kernel and nothing more.

So there are no differences in itself. There are differences in distributions package management and hardware detection tools, startup scripts and such small things, but no differences by itself. (Yes there are different kernel version, but this is not the real case i talk about).

Most installation problems i found, are user problems in exactly identifying their hardware (not knowing what is built-in), in reading documentation and in understanding how hardware is configured to work properly.

So telling a user to use another distribution will create a view, that there is not one Linux and that another distribution is a complete other kind of thing, and one thing will work and the other not.

This is definitely wrong. There is only one point that says: "Kernel supports this hardware or not". Nothing less and nothing more than this will say if a hardware will work or not. This is in principal completely independent from the distribution used.

Is this because users are unable to really help in configuring hardware or is it ignorance in how other distributions setup work? Or is it some kind half knowledge at all?

I'm a little bit disappointed about how people here tries to help someone by not answering the question but advising using another distro. This kind of answers will not solve the users problem, nor will it help him to learn anything.

Isn't it a better way to really help the user with its problem than advising using complete other thing?

I do not want to insult anyone with this statement, but i cannot understand why someone thinks it will help to suggest another distro, while this persons do not understand the problem other user has.

I think I agree with you!! (Your post is too long for my feeble brain..)

I am constantly cautioning people NOT to switch distros to solve problems---unless of course they are trying to do something with Red Hat 7.X or similar.

Hye,

i agree with you. Trying to run extremely old distro's is a reason to switch.

PS: yes, the post is very long

I don't like the idea of "Use xxxx distro instead" too. In my opinion instead of telling users to switch distro, people should find the reason why certain hardware is "working" ( as in the user has the libraries, services and programs to use it ) in a particular distro and why it doesn't on another and help the issuer to get his system to the state when the hardware is "working".

Up to a point....but a Linux distro, what people perpetually refer to as 'Linux', even though that may be several kinds of error, is not just a Linux kernel.

If the problem is hardware detection and configuration, then hardware detection is not a small thing.

Now I think that you are correct when you suggest that, in trying a different distro as a first step, rather than trying to define the problem with more clarity and working on the exact cause and therefore on a very directed solution, we may be making a mistake. But, on the other side of the argument, I'll point out that many of the people who struggle don't seem to have well developed facilities for logical debugging and just want a 'get you going' solution right now, rather than an elegant path to enlightenment.

I have to think that in an ideal world there would be no argument with that at all...would get better feedback on the problems to the distros and eventually better quality install procedures (or, better quality documentation), and who could think that this would be a bad thing?

On the other hand (and this is probably just me) every time I see a thread
where message two or three in the thread is 'post the output of xxxxx', I wonder what the OP is going to do, because its often to ignore that and do something completely different. And keep on ignoring it, for several more posts.

I generally try to refrain from suggesting a new distro unless the posters is using something that is either a) no longer an active project; b) has reached end of life; or c) has newer hardware that should work out of the box on a more recent release.

That said, there are differences in distros. In Fedora 12, my broadcom card works out of the box. Now, it's easy if you know how to get it going in any distro, but that is something to take into consideration. OpenSuse 11.2 simply will not boot properly into the desktop environment on one of my laptops. Every other distro I've tried does. I looked into troubleshooting for a while, but I couldn't solve the problem and really didn't care enough about using OpenSuse to spent too much time on it.

Sometimes, rather than spending days troubleshooting something, a different distro will simply work. Precisely because in many regards there is little difference between using Ubuntu or OpenSuse or whatever, I see no point in spending all that time pulling your hair out over a problem if the next distro in line will work without all the fuss.