[conspire] (forw) Re: Ubuntu help?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Josef Grosch (jgrosch at gmail.com):

> You have my sympathies. As I FreeBSD person I often struggle with
> video cards that will not work with the latest release. I am not
> being flippant but have you considered buying a video card that is
> know to work with Ubuntu ? The same goes for an Ethernet card? Your
> comment about "cheap" PCs really hits a chord. Penny wise, pound
> foolish. Ask any one who knows me, I have been pissing and moaning
> about how the PC manufactures are getting away with murder for
> years.
> 
> I wish you luck and if you commit violence against this electronic
> miscreant, people will agree that it had it coming.

Joe, FYI, Chaz isn't on this mailing list.  He sent me private mail,
which I then forwarded to this mailing list along with my e-mailed reply
for purposes of public edification.

For many years, I kept asking that anyone who asks me Linux help
question do it on the _public forums_ so that many people benefit from
the asking and the answering, including for many years afterwards via
searches that find matches in the Web archives.  But huge numbers of
people kept ignoring that request.  For the longest time, I tried
workarounds.  I would say 'Please cross-post that to your choice of the
following mailing lists, and I'll answer you there.'  No action.  Or I
would ask 'Please give me your approval to post your private question
and my answer publicly'.  No action.

People are lazy and unclear on the notion of community.  So, eventually,
after years of respecting privacy to an exaggerated degree and getting
my private time used up by strangers for my pains, I changed my policy:
I just post to public forums inquiries that _should_ have been sent
there in the first place, and redact out anything that looks sensitive
or nobody else's business.