When is a newbie no longer a newbie?
 

When does a newbie cease to be a newbie?

when you stop posting polls like these? :P

Well. I think in some ways, all of us are prone to newbish behavior. Gurus simply hide it more. So a 'newbie' never really escapes being a 'newbie' from his own perspective. Others may see him advance further, but basically, we're all fairly new to this anyway. None of this is all that old, or ancient, unless you start talking about sendmail :P

It's not possible to know EVERYTHING about every distribution and every problem and issue. There can be fundamental problems that even gurus have a hard time with their system at times - resorting newbish behavior. The further you get into it, the more complex you get, the more out-of-depth you are, requiring more and more research and taking more and more time. You won't get a chance to look back, things are moving so quickly. It's those who stop and look back who declare themselves gurus - it is those who keep going without looking back who become the supreme beings :D

But, less of a philisophical answer is: once you know the command line back to front and know how to write scripts and solve problems effectively.

Maybe it's when someone can read the docs and man pages and halfway know what's going on. :)

Bingo! Sometimes halfway is just enough.

"man ls" counted?

In my opinion its someone who can answer his own questions.
Not necessarilly (sp?) via his knowledge, but he knows to use rescources that are available to him.
i.e. man pages, the internet etc.

when the only questions you need to ask are enough to totally confuse a true newbie to the point of near linux-abandonment!

when he/she dies.

When you replace those AOL discs that you've been using as coasters with Microsoft Windows OS discs.

rberry88

When you can put down on your resume that you created 'Linux' and only one person can do that... ;)

I agree with chu though, I don't really consider another person a newbie if they can find the answers themselves with little or no help from others, but by reading docs, manuals and so on.

But there are so many different levels really though. One person may know everything about apache but then know nothing about zeus, so he could consider himself a newbie to zeus but a guru in apache.

And as for the replies, I'd want to see
"posts helpful replies" in several areas
rather than just going by quantities ;)

I mean, there might be people here
who specialise in posting
Option Protocol "IMPS/2"
Option ZAxisMapping "4 5"
all the time, and end up having
answered that a 5000 times ;)

That makes them helpful, but not
necessarily a guru :}



Cheers,
Tink

Indeed trickykid.

I myself think you never stop to be a newbie in linux/gnu. There are always things you don't know.

But the real users know how to use the command line.

I think you stop being a newbie when, besides knowing how and where to look for documentation, you begin to see how you can make the various parts that make up a *nix system work for you the way you want.
Of course the jump from newbie to guru would be more than one step.