Channel Flood
There is a kind of mad rush away from proprietary systems in the direction of Linux; nowhere is this as keenly felt as in the IRC support channels, where several thousands of users gather daily to get a dual boot, wipe XP, Vista, and even Mac OS X from their systems and get into the open source mix.
It can be frustrating at first, as the traffic in certain channels is so high that keeping track of the person you are helping or are being helped by just scrolls by so quickly, and even though the moderators do their damnedest to maintain order, it can be somewhat chaotic at times.
This is not just about turning to Linux, but for many users, it is their first installation of a system ever–many of them having purchased boxes that came with a system completely pre-installed–and the number of simple questions on setting up mp3 playback or getting the spinning cube or even dealing with a sound issue create a kind of white noise after a while.
The most amazing thing about this all is that many of the individuals helping out are people who not that long ago were completely new users themselves, even folks that have no real issues on their own Linux systems, just there to pay back the help they got at some point in the past, either on the various user forums, from a friend they know who uses Linux, or from the channels they now seemingly inhabit.
There are certainly a number of individuals who forget that it is not a service center at their beck and call, but simply volunteers, and act with a degree of less than total politeness, though thankfully they are a tiny minority.
Then there are the folks that just seem to know how to answer your question, or have questions you have faced in the past, and needs meet source in a very nice place. Something you don’t often find in the proprietary world.
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