I am responding to the italicized note in the user
manual (pdf).
1) Your early adopters probably do not look at the
user manual any more.
2) Having written some documents like this, I do
not believe that most people realize how difficult it is to make a process
simple and clear without making it insulting. A company I used to work for
had a 5 day course on writing user manual and procedures that they marketed
nation wide. I do not know if the still do so. I went through that
course and it was amazingly difficult. All you need to do is write down
what to do and no one will understand you.
3) Those who are into Linux are into the
bleeding edge of technology and want to make it run, not tell others how to make
it run. An audience of true nerds, and I will raise my hand, will like to
see the thing work. Documentation is in last place. I appreciate
what you run into on the thankless task of documentation and keeping it
current. My guess is that this is the one thing that is the major weak
spot in Linux. If anything except perhaps support, will kill Linux, it
will be lousy documentation. Having been a Unix system administrator for a
long while, I have seen great systems go away because of documentation or
support. Legato nearly went under because of support. The system is
good, I chose it to back up 25 production Unix boxes into a tape silo over a 1G
fiber network. After I left, I understand they went with another system
because they could no longer get any answers to their questions and the
documentation was not clear. I am retired on disability now. I have heard
rumors that Legato has turned the problems around and is recovering some of it's
lost market share.
I have just started trying to use Wine on Fedora
Core2 and I will be reading all the documentation. What I have seen so far
has been well done. I will be finding out if it still applies, and applies
to Quicken 2004 Deluxe.
Sincerely yours,
Patrick C. McKelvey PE
Cincinnati, Ohio