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> Personally I'd say most of the time the problem is the lack of documentation, help, manuals, guides etc. This is a very “blue pill” way of looking at technology. Like when a huge company releases a SaaS product, and it observed a high bounce rate from the first few days of trial usage of your new Educational Software, blah blah blah, the metrics, blah blah, improve documentation to improve the metric, because that logically seems to be related to the bounce rate, and look there’s this Net Promoter Score survey that says people didn’t use the stuff we put in there or they seem confused so of course onboarding is what we’re missing... Linux is in disguise the most used operating system in the world, it’s the worst example to bring up because you’re talking about real pain points. But this whole idea of “pain points” and the metrics and the onboarding and documentation stuff, this is just a bunch of post hoc rationalizing business speak, a form of astrology in product development that would have been 200% wrong about Linux’s success and will continue to be wrong about all sorts of software. And then you’ll jump into pedantry, like “oh I meant specifically software under Linux not Linux itself,” or whatever. Listen it doesn’t matter, documentation doesn’t really matter, the people writing documentation for unsuccessful or useless stuff will not make it useful by writing documentation. Documentation can’t fix what’s wrong with a piece of broken software. However it is an enteprise product, it is a piece of utterly worthless differentiation that salespeople can go out and sell and buyers can go buy, and the money changed hands, so of course everyone is out there talking about how important it is. Don’t use software that’s hard for you to use! No one is forcing you to write systemd units, iptables commands, command like arguments for ffpmeg etc. And yet, it must piss you off so much that there are people basically selling this free software in wrappers. You’re willing to try at least, which is good, and it’s not coming from a place of valuing your time or from lack of knowledge or accessibility - it’s from the ethos of not being ripped off, of giving the people doing the valuable thing (writing the software not the docs) most of the value, and not some commercial halfwit middleman. The ethos of being revolted about giving money to some giant company, so that some VP who doesn’t do anything can chauffeur his kids to their pod in the repurposed yoga studio on 1 Main Street of his suburban home’s town. This is what free software for education is about. When the time isn’t super important, when the money is either not spent or sucked up by cronies - certainly not spent efficiently - you want a piece of software that is compatible with the ethos of what education is really about. Education, more than anything else, is fundamentally opposed to the enriching of middlemen. In software middlemen tend to slap documentation on free stuff. |