I cant speak to the IRC stuff since I never did use it much. I can say that as you stated Linux (mint) does just work now. I have in the recent past installed it on the laptops of three computer users that could navigate windows but not much beyond that. After I set them up with mint they were happy. No questions, no issues. I made sure they had chrome and firefox as that was what they were used to, plus an install of thunderbird just in case. I was expecting a fair amount of follow-up support would be needed, but it wasn't. They could web browse and email faster then they were used to and just very very happy with that. Back in 96 I downloaded the slackware distro one floppy at a time and set it up. It took me a few months to find a way to get X-windows running with my graphics card, but I did get there. It's nice to see that things have matured enough that you don't have to beat your head to use and love linux. (I know I'm sending this from a windows 10 install, but Linux is my main OS) On 1/9/2017 4:04 PM, Mike Miller wrote: > On Sun, 11 Sep 2016, Sandwhich Eyes wrote: > >> so do most people use irc now? >> i notice the volume of this list has gone from around 15 or so emails >> a day >> to 1 or 2 a week. >> where are all the newbie questions being answered? > > Maybe we don't have as many noobs, but I'll say for sure that these > two things have affected my use of the list: > > (1) Ubuntu/Linux software mostly just works for me now. It has > improved a lot over the years so I have fewer questions now. And... > > (2) Google answers a lot more questions than it used to. I find a lot > of answers on Ubuntu forums and such, so less need to ask here. > > I hope plenty of new people are getting into using Linux but I'm not > really sure what the data show. It seems like Macs with their OS X > unix really took off, but did that cut into the Linux user base? > > Best, > > Mike > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus