Alessandro Selli <alessandrose...@linux.com> wrote: > >> The problem is that people are not told why they should away from i386, and > > Of course they are, it's all over the Internet.
Being pedantic, that’s not the same - and you **should** know that. IMO there’s a choice to be made - do we (collectively) want to be inclusive and support all those who don’t know much about computing but want to try an alternative to Mac/Windows; or do we (collectively) want to stay elitist and show an attitude that “people should know these things” ? When you make that statement that a possibly newbie user should know such technical details because “it’s all over the internet" then you are falling into the elitist trap of assuming that those with less knowledge than yourself *should* have that knowledge - and more importantly *should* know that they need to gain that knowledge and where to gain it from. The big problem being that these people don’t know what they don’t know, have probably never seen these technical discussions “all over the internet”, and even if they have then they will not have been able to understand what it means in practice. There is a middle ground here. No need to put all the arguments on the DL page, but put a note along the lines of “unless you are certain you need to use i386 then you should use the AMD64 images, for more information see <provide a few links to relevant information>”. It’s not offensive to those who do need those versions, it’s educational to those who didn’t know, and it doesn’t take up much space on the page. FWIW, even technical users can lack what some may think is “really basic knowledge” - I fell that the most important thing I’ve learned over the years is just how much I don’t know ! At a previous place I only got “hand me down” hardware as the company manglement were (and still are) wedded to a mindset of “if it didn’t come from Redmond then we don’t want to know” and so the services I ran on Debian only got hardware that had been retired from Windoze hosting due to Windows Server requirements. Eg, At one time I had a load of Dell 2850 servers as they’d had to upgrade to 2950 (or better) - I vaguely recall that it was a requirement of HyperV for a better processor. For a long time, ALL my servers were i686 images. This was partly because I had older servers (as my immediate manager (a knowledgable and good chap) put it, 9 years past their refresh date), but partly because it was a long time after it became the case before I found out that newer Intel processors run AMD64 images. Of course, even when I got a host capable of running AMD64 code, I still had to keep my VMs compatible with the older hosts. A couple of years ago I managed to get some AMD64 based machines as hosts - still ancient hand-me-downs but massive upgrades in capability and much reduced power consumption - and started migrating stuff to AMD64. But before I could get very far they made the 2 of us left redundant and got rid of it all - the “I don’t understand it so it’s going” mentality of a particular mangler. I did feel sorry for some of the customers as this mangler produced one screwup after another due entirly to his “change stuff and see what breaks” approach to systems reliability - a five day email outage that I could have fixed in a couple of hours (most of that being time to copy the mail store), customers DNS breaking because he had no clue about how DNS secondaries work when you just remove the master, …. But that’s drifting off the topic - it’s not fair to assume that everyone else knows what you do, and if they don’t then it’s their fault. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
