Every now and then I'm forced to make a foray into the cruel cold world of Windows and Mac programming.
I'm usually horrified by how unwelcoming and unhelpful it is.
It's been a few years since I last went over to "The Dark Side of the Internet", the previous times were so painful.
But the one thing I have struck by over the decades is this...
To get a Good Answer in the Windows/Mac world was often hard. Often you have to pay for it, often the trolls and brats spend more time hating you for being new than answering.
To get a Good Answer in the Linux world... You just have to ask. Yip, there are better and worse ways of asking, but usually almost always I end up wiser for asking and just as often, wiser for having tried to answer.
It's just plain part of the Linux culture, but with numbers like 5,169,549 posts on LQ...
I guess we have Jeremy to thank for a massive and formative contribution to that culture.
And with the advent of the
www.*questions.org, he has been spreading that openness.
Thanks Jeremy!
What new features or sections would you like to see?
Open source advances very slowly.... Any one package you watch changes very little at a time.
But it advances on an incredibly broad front.
Even someone like me who uses nothing but open source, cannot even begin to track the tiniest portion of it.
What we need is a better insight into comparative advantages and disavantages of various tools.
For example, let's take the category SQL databases.
Polls don't really help... since while I can rave about the ease of sqlite and the power of postgresql... but I last used mysql 5 years ago and I have never used mariadb.
We need a little more scientific and rational way than a popularity contest or poll to evaluate the value, the merits and demerits of the various tools.
