[NCLUG] local end-user support

[Paul Hummer]

As a social experiment that I meant to blog about (yet never did), I 
took my Dell Inspiron into the Geek Squad (Firedog wasn't partnered with 
Circuit City at the time, or I would have gone there too), and told them 
I was getting kernel panics (which I wasn't...).  They booted it up into 
its Debian OS.  After fumbling around for a while, they realized that 
this was not a Windows skin, but something completely different (E16).  
Half an hour later, I pointed out that it was Debian linux, and they 
immediately said "Oh, we don't support linux."

This post also made me realize why you don't see as active of a Windows 
community as we do with our LUG.  Non-Windows and non-OSX users are self 
starters for one reason only: these linux end user support companies, if 
they exist at all, are well hidden.  Along with that, the very nature of 
an open source end user is a self-starting problem solver.  There are 
those that are better than others at it, but the community becomes the 
source of information.  That's why the Gentoo wiki and the Ubuntu forum 
are so often hammered.

I guess a similar question would be "Where are the voting stations in a 
socialist environment?"

Paul