What is it about Ubuntu Linux that makes otherwise competent technical writers switch to Moron Mode? Everywhere I turn, I see articles on how to do obvious things in Ubuntu. Books on Ubuntu concentrate on listing every insignificant detail of every obvious procedure; things that are inherently self-explanatory are explained in depth. Subjects that have any inkling of technical complexity are skipped because, "Whoa -- those are way too hard for you stupid Ubuntu users to grasp, so let's just skip them and pretend everything's peachy." The best I can guess is that article writers and book authors assume that if you were capable of something more technical, you would be using Slackware or Debian, not Ubuntu.
I don't know what specifically pushed me over the edge about Ubuntu articles. Maybe it was the daily "How to do something obvious in Ubuntu" blog post on the front page of Digg; maybe it was the umpteenth "Ubuntu for complete and utter noobs" book that I've been offered for review; maybe it was the fact that I was writing a Linux migration book for moderately technical people until the publisher decided that it, too, needed to be the umpteenth-and-first "Ubuntu for complete and utter noobs" iteration; maybe it's all of the above.
Back in the dark days before Windows was more than just a memory-hogging graphical toy, I had a similar opinion of Apple users. Every time I met one, he'd go on and on about how easy it was to do something, as though I should be struggling with my PC that had an interface that I found to be both creative and intuitive -- the DOS command line. I began to think of Apple users as drooling idiots who were not mentally capable of navigating the CLI, and therefore needed a low-IQ-friendly, one-button toy to play with while the rest of us were using good old blue-screened WordPerfect and playing online multiplayer games on The Sierra Network (which required manual dialup configuration!). My, how times have changed -- now Apple computers are arguably more difficult to use than their competitors, so the drooling idiots have moved to the unlikeliest of places -- Linux, ala Ubuntu. Or at least, that's what so many tech writers seem to believe.
The subject matter of the majority of Linux articles and books does make a difference; it affects how people think about Linux. On the one hand, the over-simplistic how-to guides provide the impression that Ubuntu is easy to use, or at very least that appropriate documentation is available. On the other hand, the articles in question are published in places where only technical people are likely to see them, and therefore present a more negative impression -- that Ubuntu is for noobs and morons. If you are a technically-minded Windows user who wants to switch to Linux, Ubuntu could very well seem like an option to avoid because of this stigma-by-association.
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