I don't think there's any call to be mean to people, but I find it
highly grating when someone shows up on a newsgroup (mailing list, web
board) and demands answers when they clearly have made zero effort
themselves.

If someone makes a polite request, I'm much more interested in helping
them.

I think this might be in part a cultural thing. I've noticed that a
lot of the posts that come off as incredibly rude or demanding seem to
be written by people for whom English is not the first language, and
who don't seem to live in the Americas or Western Europe.  That group
also seems to favor using textspeak abbreviations ('u' for 'you', '2'
for 'to', etc), which seems to drive a lot of people up the wall,
fairly or not.

We had a very knowledgeable guy in our PC club.  If ever asked a
question he would go on for at least 30 minutes. The questioner had in
mind most of the time a couple of sentences for a reply.  I used to
host the Q&A session and tended to that mode myself, looking on my
answers more as entertainment for everyone than specific help for the
questioner.

You have to remember we are neotenous apes, and much of our
conversation has an undertone of dominance hierarchy. As we are
expounding technically, we are also displaying like a prairie chicken
or dominating.  Knowledge of some esoteric realm is a great way for an
otherwise low status ape to impress his fellows.  Much question
answering is a form of hazing.

It is a bit silly when a novice asks to learn esoteric knowledge and
is told he is stupid for not knowing it already. He is clearly working
to rectify the situation.  

It is a very old game. Knights used to laugh at their squires when
they did not know the complete set of venery rules (brace of
pheasants). See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/collectivenouns.html

   One of my more memorable experience with "Linux snobs" was when I had
asked help for a networking driver. I had downloaded a driver off the
internet, put it on a floppy diskette, loaded it onto the linux machine, and
then checked out the readme. It said to compile the drivers using "gcc"
followed by 3 lines worth of command line arguments (at around 80 characters
per line, that's 240 characters worth of command line arguments).

   So I type in the command exactly like I see it (except I ignored the
newlines, and uses spaces instead), only to have gcc tell me that one of the
flags I provided (e.g. "-foo") was no longer supported. There was no
suggestion of what flag I should use instead, and simply omitting the flag
yielded even more cryptic and dangerous sounding error messages.

   So I during that period (a couple of years ago, while I still had the
exact command line I entered, and the exact error messages I got), whenever
I found out someone was an "experienced" Linux user, I'd ask them if they
knew how to solve my problem. One of the answers I got was "If you're too
stupid to use a compiler, you shouldn't be using Linux."

   Now here's the real shocker: this wasn't in an online newsgroup or
mailing list. He had said this to me, in person, to my face. We were both
computer science students at the same university, attending the same class.
In fact, he was my partner for a project in which we were writing a RPG in
Java. I had designed the finite state machine interfaces that he had to
implement to allow for the transition between my "overworld map" engine to
his "monster battle" engine. We got the highest grade possible for the
project (an A). Either he was saying that for all compilers, I was too
stupid to use them (and thus too stupid to use Linux); or he was saying that
if there exists a compiler for which I am too stupid to use, I would also be
too stupid for Linux. Both interpretations didn't make sense to me.

   I was stunned by his response, so our conversation had ended there. The
next days, we'd continue to meet up and work on the project, but we never
brought up the topic of Linux again.

   This article links to a blog entry in which someone claims that people
who say "RTFM" do so because they don't know the answer and wish to sound
smart. In my experience, when someone doesn't know the answer, they tend to
simply not respond, letting someone else give it a stab. Every now and then
in this group, you'll see someone ask a very obscure question, and they
receive zero responses; I suspect because no one knows the answer.

   The article also links to other sites which criticize Eric Steven
Raymond, and from that, infer that the "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way"
document (http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html) is "bad". This
is known as an "ad hominem" attack, and is a logical fallacy. I've read the
smart-questions document, and while I don't agree with everything it says, I
believe that a person who blindly follows the rules there will probably get
better results than a person who willingly breaks all of the rules. I'm NOT
saying that I know Eric Raymond personally, and he's a great guy, and that
all those bad things said about him are lies. In fact, I had never even
noticed who the author of the document was until reading the above article,
and the sites it links to. I've never met Eric Raymond. I'm just saying
regardless of Mr. Raymonds personality, the document, overall, has some good
advice.

   Every now and then I get surprised by what people find insulting.
Someone asked me for advice on building a custom computer (not physically
building it; rather selecting the components and having it pre-built). She
showed me the specs she was considering. I knew that all she never plays any
games at all on her computer; not even solitair or hearts. So I told her she
didn't need the $300 3D accelerator video card she had listed (this was back
in the days before Vista, so OS UIs were strictly 2D), and onboard video
would be sufficient. For some reason, she took this as an insult, I guess
because I was implying that she wasn't "worthy" of the video card. She
complained, and pointed out that I had an expensive video card in my
computer (I *do* play games, like Fable, Doom 3, etc.), and accused me of
treating her like an inferior. So I told her she's free to do whatever she
wants with her money, but that she had came to me for advice, and my advice
is to not buy that video card.

   - Oliver

(Yeah, she bought the video card in the end; and she still doesn't play
computer games.)

Well, being one of those snobs I consider the article very biased, it also
totally ignores the background as to why some of these people present
themselves in the way they do and also seems to totally ignore the actual
conversation.

On the topic of Linux its safe to say that many of the bigger distributions
come with many documentation. Not all of this is of high quality but when it
comes to basic issues like starting/stopping programs, logging in, selecting
window managers, etc. you can find it all in either the userguides or the many
FAQs out there. A key issue to this mentioned problem is that many people are
willing to try another OS (especially since they obviously heard many good
stories about it) but don't seem to be willing to spend much time on learning
it.

While that is their own choice to make its becoming annoying when it becomes
obvious that they're trying to use other people as a substitute for spending
the time, and in many cases get totally outraged when someone suggest that they
actually spend some time on their basic skills.

When taking a look at that example about the webserver ("how do I start process
daemons like a web server" / "Hi jackass, RTFM and stop wasting our time trying
to help you children learn."). Starting to call people names like this is
something I wouldn't approve off, but in many cases I would also respond in an
RTFM type of answer. Probably in the likes of "use one of the rc.d scripts
found in /etc/init.d/ RTFM". There are many people who don't like such an
answer and immediatly feel highly insulted.

In most cases, but thats just my opinion, the problem starts the moment that
someone starts asking about certain issues while clearly showing that he hasn't
spend one minute on reading / looking for any basics. That is an absolute basis
for snappy remarks. Some start scolding, others become cynical... Personally I
can understand this quite well; some people spend quite some time on writing
and maitaining documentation and these days its rather common for newbies to
start by totally ignoring this. Ofcourse not everytime, but from a personal
observation I do see a growing amount of people who approach it this way.

While I respect the "linux snobs" I also can understand the motivation behind
some of the newbies. They're obviously used to Windows-like environments where
most things can be done without the need for any manual. When it comes to user
interfaces I think that Microsoft has done a remarkable job; its IMO undenyable
that whenever you put a newbie behind an environment like Windows XP or the
likes it doesn't take them too long to grasp its basics. And when you read many
stories about how great and easy Linux is (www.linspire.com -> 'what is Linux'
-> "Linux is... Virus & Spyware Free! Ultra Affordable!  Super Stable! There is
a growing interest in using Linux on the desktop computer, and these days it's
easier than ever to try.".

Lets say I'm a little better than the average newbie and I actually use Google
to get more information: (http://www.google.com/search?q=linux. I get
linux.org, linux.com, redhat.com, debian.org, etc.). Let the confusion begin!
Linux is a free unix-like OS. Good, Linux OS. But I have RedHat Linux, Debian
Linux, Linux Linux....

By the time they finally found a distribution and managed to burn it to CD I'm
also quite sure they lost all the will to do any more reading and would prefer
some actual action :-)

So concluding: I don't think it is fair to speak of "Linux snobs" and "Linux
newbies/cluebies" per facto. It depends on simply way too much different
factors. And for the record; I too think that the 'smart questions page' is an
excellent piece of work.

Rudeness is in the eyes of the beholder. These days people can get upset when
you point them to the documentation. But I do agree that some of the examples
pointed out on that website are over the top. Still, I am a bit sceptical about
the whole story.

The reason why I don't think this will happen in the Java groups, at least not
in that extend, is that Java is already something beyond your Joe Doe computer
user. Its not about someone who bought a PC, learned his way around Windows and
now wants something "better" and expects it to be just as Windows.

Instead your target audience is now a group of people who are mostly a little
further with computer knowledge than that. Ofcourse that too is generalizing,
even with Java you encounter people who want to to "do Java" but immediatly
display a total lack of understanding and willingless.

Perhaps the approach is still friendlier in here, in most cases they tend to
get ignored. I'm pretty positive that in other groups / forums such people
might also get a little other response.