Documentation - and needing it! (Score 1)

There are two things, in my experience, that are holding Linux - and indeed, the majority of open-source projects - back. Firstly (in no particular order) is that documentation is generally nonexistent, inadequate, outdated, or even actively misleading. When this isn't the case, it's too frequently written from the viewpoint of someone who already knows exactly what they want to do, they have just forgotten where the button is. I've been using computers for thirty years (running just about every common OS there's been over that time period), and programming for most of that - and I still come across too many cases where they're using a different term than I would have used, and thus it ends up being a steeplechase to try to figure out how to do what I'm after. I also am frustrated at how often I need to try going to the documentation in the first place - if it's a simple, frequently-performed task, it should be fairly intuitive, which would indicate that after as long as I've been using computers, I should be able to figure it out! The other downfall I've come across is a "complexity gap" - Linux is, in my experience, fine for a beginning user, and okay for a gearhead... but the people in between are kind of screwed. The basic stuff "just works", and if you are willing to hack scripts or compile code, you can do just about anything - but all too often, if you need to do something even just a little past the basic stuff, you *have* to start hacking scripts.