Discussion on:

Linux: The big misconceptions

It is hard finding (good) help.
Perhaps you could post a list of good Linux help forums/sites.

That said, if you've never used any other OS, it probably isn't any harder to learn the necessary tricks.

I'm not sure if Unity is particularly user-friendly if you have to find something that isn't on the Unity bar (what is it called?).
You have to try your luck with HUD.
The same thing is true of Metro.

I prefer the "discoverability" that menus provide (but I've used menu-based operating systems for years).
I prefer Ubuntu 10.04 or Linux Mint 13 (MATE).

To start off, thanks for the cert links! LPI.org had a link to a free ebook (Linux Essentials) from linupfront that should be really helpful for the IT side of things. I'm in a Windows shop but would like to replace some of our file and web servers with Linux. I've tested Ubuntu Server 12.04 on a VM, but have had mixed results--Apache install/removal failure, failure halfway through the GUI install. Speaking of which, everyone on the forums I read said never to install the GUI on a Linux server in the first place because of the performance hit, although they also seemed to be purists. There was a fairly clear message, at least in those forums, that GUIs are for the incompetent.

Anyway, I know the errors happened because I'm a Linux noob trying to do tricky stuff, but for this to work, I'll need to be able to convince our team that a Linux server is safer, faster, and not too difficult to learn and fix. I'm convinced on points 1 and 2, but the last one is looking like a hard sell.

The real issue is they just don't work that well. They often lead you to waste your time trying to get something done via point and click that you could have done in seconds on the cli....only to find after wasting your time....the subset of things you wanted to make the server do isn't in the menu at all.

A friend of mine went to an interview a couple of days ago. Some of the questions were about how to deal with various tech support problems he would be facing. When he suggested that to solve one of them he would use the CLI, the interviewer got very excited and practically offered him the job on the spot. He made such an impression that they are going to pay him the salary they advertised, althoug he did have to push a little to get that.

I am a coder, not a techie, and in recent years have come to rely on tech support to solve my problems faster than figuring them out myself (my employer is quite insistent about that). But I have a couple of copies of DR DOS 6 that I keep in the loft, despite all the clear-outs that have seen me throw out other software. Don't worry if you don't know what that is, it's getting to be quite an elite group who do.

If you mean use the desktop, then the question is nonsensical.

If you want to go below the desktop then that's much harder, than learning an other desktop...
Harder than learning what's under the covers in windows, or any other OS for that matter?

Much of a muchness. Some things will pop up in google, or a book or a course straight off, others you'll have to dig for.

If you don't want to, that's what the desktop is for...

as part of the compulsory subjects to study, as well as a couple of Unix courses, in the IT certifications.

I've also found some good Linux reference works in good bookshops, those that carry the O'Reilly publications and the McGraw Hill ones are good.

I use and recommend Zorin OS as it's based on Ubuntu but has a few steroids added, especially in the GUI area where it has a range of GUIs so you can look at what looks like Win 2000, Mac OS, Win XP, Win 7, and many others.

My 30 year career has revolved around DOS/Windows, so there is little opportunity to use Linux on a regular basis, but I take every opportunity to play with Linux when I can. I have seen wonderful changes in operating systems and general software usability that today makes computing a joy to learn, instead of the daunting task that I faced all those years ago.

Unlike Windows it is not going to break the bank trying it out.

Much software developed for Linux also has versions that run on Windows, although the reverse is quite rare. So it is easier to go from Linux to Windows than the other way, where you often have to re-learn many apps.

Most problems I have faced over recent years have been resolved by answers found with search engines. I haven't even needed to post a question because someone, somewhere has faced the same or similar, and the answers are right there to be found.

The trouble is the lack of support for laptops. My company, like many, replaced most desktops with laptops, and at home, also like many others, I want a laptop that can be put away when not in use, not a desktop that clutters up the space. But I couldn't find a distro of Linux that will install on my laptop, and I see no reason to put it out to grass whilst it can give good service running XP.

So is Linux still archaic? Yeah, a little bit.

My Dell Inspiron 14 ran away from Windows 7 six months ago. will never go back, and settled in with Xubuntu 12 which in "my" opinion is the easiest distro for either Mac or Windows laptop users to master. For the rare instances I need to run Windows only apps or Microsoft Office, I have XP & Office installed in a Virtual box that runs like a Champ! I also have an Asus eee Pc 900 SSD netbook that dual boots XP & Puppy Linux 5.2 (another easy to learn distro) that can be installed and will boot from a usb or in my case an SD card.
I have Windows, Mac and Linux laptops & desktops.

I haven't had any problems loading Ubuntu on a 5 year old HP Pavilion... Granted, it didn't like 12.04 too much but it runs 10.04 great.

If you learn Linux, you will see layers of patches, the program installation hell (which version works? Repeat for each and every dependency) and years long stagnation on critical problems, like linked 10-bit video.

All that "easy Linux" marketing bla-bla is in fact trading ease of doing easy things (easy things are EASY, the very idea is fundamentally flawed) for the ease of fixing. Overall, both Windows and honest Linux (like Arch) are better than "easy Linuxes" including Ubuntu.

The more I look at Linux, the more I understand that its current culture cannot go beyond a mess of half baked apps desperately combined in a "distribution". More so, there are signs that commercial culture is penetrating into Linux unable to compete with Windows or iOS but able to spoil the FOSS ecosystem even further.

Thus, I guess that the desktop Linux has peaked, and I do not care if it were 1 or 2 percent.

I would say if you are new to Linux - Try UBUNTU. It is one of the easiest and most USER FRIENDLY Distributions out there. There are plenty of distributions out there - just go to http://distrowatch.com/ to get overwhelmed. Then there is the "interface" which can be used. "Gnome 2.X" or now there is "Gnome 3.0" or "Unity", KDE, Mate .... etc. The beauty is you can "try" them ALL without having to "commit" - well you will have to commit to one of them at least, and did you hear about the FREE part - Open-Source = FREE.
I think it is the verity of choices that is scaring away new users. WHERE DO I START ?.
My answer to that is at the easiest point Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with Unity. Then go from there.

"Open-Source = FREE"

It definitely does not always equal 'No payment'. Just because a program is open source does not require the author to give it away, and does not prevent him or her from charging a fee for it.

I agree that the range of choices can be overwhelming, especially if the potential user doesn't know enough to make an informed choice.

It depends on the license, but at least with the GPL (what the Linux kernel and most of the standard Linux tools are released under) you need to distribute the source with the binaries and the users are allowed to redistribute it. The author can charge for it, but then the person who buys it can just give it away to everyone for free, put it up on the Internet for free download, etc. so there's no realistic way to require anyone who uses it to pay for it. Other licenses are more permissive and it could be possible to keep things more closed.

The choices really aren't overwhelming... if you're looking for a general desktop distro, that rules out most of the distros right there. There's a handful of major desktop distros, and if it's a newbie not looking for a bleeding edge rolling distro or a source-based distro, that leaves a handful of choices. The best part is that you can't go *wrong* with any of those choices, and provided you've got a separate home partition, it can be easy to change later on.

A newbie coming from a Windows background may not understand different distros are targeted toward different purposes. It's way outside their experience; pre-installed Windows pretty much comes in one variety at a time. They buy the hardware and take what comes on it.

Odds are pretty good they won't know the difference between a partition and a hard drive. (Many won't know the difference between the hard drive and case it and the other components are mounted in.)

... they may actually have to - - *read* something!

Windows 8 itself comes in four editions, Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro, Windows 8 Enterprise, and Windows RT - that's not counting things like the Pro Pack or Media Center Pack you can pay additional for to upgrade the OS. Older editions of Windows actually came in even more editions, especially in the netbook era.

32 bit and 64 bit, the same as most Linux versions do.

Another point is the Win RT comes so locked down that there's very little option to install anything on it after purchase. And it comes with special Microsoft spyware that reports back and you can't turn it off.

aren't going to have Enterprise as an option. RT is only pre-installed available on selected tablet models.

But most consumers won't even make the Pro / non-Pro choice. They'll buy a new computer and take what comes pre-installed. Linux doesn't come pre-installed, so they're forced to make a decision.

When they get a choice they're "forced" to make a decision; meanwhile the use of "forced" isn't applied to the consumers who have no choice about the version of OS they're getting on their new device.

Everyone always recommends Ubuntu to newbies to the point that it's becoming the AOL disk of Linux. It really depends where they're coming from. If they're Windows users, something with a default KDE desktop might be much better suited for them - in fact, KDE is more similar to Windows 7 than Windows 8 is to Windows 7.

But you are right that one can (and should) try more than one distro at first. My early mistake was going for a rolling release distro first. What I liked about the last one I tried - OpenSUSE - was that the install DVD offered KDE, Gnome, LXDE, and XFCE as desktop choices so you could easily try out the different desktops. It also installed several PDF manuals including a quick start guide to KDE, to LibreOffice, etc. as well as more advanced manuals on security and system optimization. The installer was very pleasant to use and smart enough to find my Windows partitions and offer to mount them correctly in Linux, which made the transition easier as well. In fact, I started "testing" OpenSUSE and a year later I realized I was still running my "test" without having gone back into WIndows.

Although the interface is indeed user friendly and well set out,
I have tried Ubuntu but printer and scanner drivers were not available except in a very rudimentary fashion with mediocre results. None of the adjustments like best quality, no borders, paper type etc. Same for scanner. This is important to me since I use them commercially.
Also it is very difficult to install new programs even by following the instructions maticulously.
Photoshop not available with Linux.

two peripherals designed to be Windows only and have a critical application that's also Windows only. In that situation you have little choice, just as Microsoft intended when they pressured some hardware manufacturers to walk away from the industry standards to make stuff suitable for Windows only.

This is one of Linux' biggest problems. For desktop environments, and probably in truth office servers, Windows IS the industry standard! I use Linux for lots of things, but in truth it is a half baked solution stuck firmly in the 1970s. "Standards" means it can't evolve. And that is probably why so many people stick to it religiously - an article of faith not a reasoned choice.

that sets them and Microsoft is part of it. They were very vocal in helping set the standards in the early 1990s. However, when the committee insisted any proprietary stuff had to be given up licence free if they wanted it to be an approved standard. Then MS went on to ignore all the industry standards since then, except where the market has forced them to comply, such as USB. The worst thing about Microsoft is that every standard they've ignored they change every few years to increase their profits

...that's called "vendor lock-in". Vendor lock-in is when a proprietary format means you're stuck without requiring a great deal of time/effort/money to switch. I once used a new scheduling program and wanted to switch to another. I learned the vendor had gone out of business in the meantime and the export data function was "unimplemented" when I tried to use it. The format the data was saved in was also unreadable and proprietary. I had to run a new system and old system side by side for three months until I didn't need the data in the old one anymore; the only alternative would have been manual re-entry of it all. That's vendor lock-in.

MS has fought standards forever. Internal documents revealed at one trial against it declared that anytime a programmer developed for their de facto standards they "won" and anytime they coded for an open standard MS "lost" in their mind. They also wrote about co-opting standards; this is what the industry dubbed "embrace, extend, extinguish". For example: MS loved HTML... so much, in fact, they added their own custom extensions to the standard and encouraged developers to use them. What happened? A lot of websites that would only work correctly with Internet Explorer 6, which naturally people like you blamed on Netscape and switched to IE 6. MS tried doing this with Java, implementing a VM for Windows and then adding their own extensions here too. This broke the "write once, run anywhere" promise of Java and Sun successfully sued them over it. It's evil and pernicious and it's a symptom of a desperate need by MS to avoid ever having to compete. It's the reason Gates' biggest fear at MS was that other OSes would come into existence and MS did many things to kill of nascent mobile OSes, including breaking an NDA and announcing their own handheld (that didn't exist) to convince other software makers to hold off backing a startup's PDA and see what MS planned to offer, which ultimately killed off the start-up.

Linux didn't exist until the 1990's, so I don't know why it's stuck in the 1970s in your mind. In fact, Linux constantly evolves (new kernel releases about every six months, major distro and desktop releases every 6-9 months) so it's actually leading rather than being stuck. That's why Windows users have had to wait until the imminent release of Windows 8 to finally get native USB 3 drivers unlike Linux users, with Linux being the first OS to incorporate them. (Think it's not a problem? Try installing Windows on a set top box or thin client with only two USB 2 ports. Since the install disk doesn't have USB 3 drivers, you can only have a keyboard OR mouse during install since you need one port for the external drive and need to keep switching.)

Standards evolve all the time... HTML1-5, USB 1-3, ODF (open document format) 1.1 and 1.2, etc. Standards are ALWAYS a reasoned choice. As I illustrated above, not using them can leave you stuck. In fact, it's been suggested it's like nuclear power plants. When budgeting for them, the power company needs to incorporate the end-of-life cost of the plant: decommissioning, disposing of radioactive material, cleaning the site, etc. Sooner or later you're going to need to replace any piece of software. If it's proprietary, you similarly should include the cost of switching away from it in your total cost of ownership projections (rather than in the cost of any new software). Now if you do that, the proprietary app often becomes much more expensive than using an app with an open standard or open source in the first place. It's simply best practices to use official standards wherever possible, and my mind boggles at anyone who thinks it's faith. If you were buying a house, would you be ok with the outlets being custom-shaped and only able to connect to the appliances that came with the house, only available from one (aging) vendor? That's vendor lock-in, and that's what you're championing. I'll take standard outlets and USB connectors over proprietary ones any day.

the same about Microsoft Word .DOC format being the document standard! Well, the Industry Standard is, and has been been for a lot of years, the Open Document Text or .ODT and it's fully compatible over all version. Those who use Microsoft and only ever use .DOC have major issues as Microsoft has used the ,DOC extension for a number of non-compatible Word formats; they are - Word,original DOS to Word for Windows 2a; Word 97, Wor2000/XP, Word 2003, Word 2007/2010 (last two also have .docx too). So which is the proper MS Standard you wish to claim as the Industry Standard?

If you have a MS Word document saved in any format prior to 2000/XP it won't open and be saved safely in Word 2003 or anything since. In some cases you can get special extension programs for Word to open and resave older format documents. That's worth keeping in mind because there are legal requirements to keep some documents like contract negotiations in their original form and with their original creation and modification dates. Open a Word 97 Document in Word 2003 with the extension program and you find the document has a new creation and modification date, thus blowing away the legal proof of their original dates.

I'm sure someone will go off their nut about keeping documents that are that old. Well, you can either store electronic documents or rooms fool of printed copies which have no record of when they were originally made. Laws from back in the 1990s allow the use of the creation and modification dates of electronic files to be valid legal evidence in many case. For legal reason the documents on contract negotiations are required to be kept for the duration of the contract, and many are also needed for the seven year take review period beyond the last tax year the contract was valid for. With the introduction of email and electronic document exchanges in the early 1990s many contract negotiations were not put on paper and signed until towards the end. I have copies of negotiation documents from the early 1990s for long term contracts that did NOT finish until Dec 2007. Final tax year was 2007/2008 as our tax years is July to June. I can destroy those Word 2a documents in July 2015. Until then I have a legal obligation to maintain them as original documents, and I've had the need to review them over the years. I've never been able to review them in MS Word 2003 or any version of Word since, but have been able to safely review them in Open Office and now in Libre Office.

edit to fix typo out - our

The ODF did set the first officially recognized document format standards, but Microsoft succeeded in getting their formats recognized, too, if I remember correctly. That might mean something to government-ordered procurements, but the real standard is what the majority of people use. Is there a standard for AA batteries? I don't know, but I can buy any battery labelled AA and expect it to work in a device that wants AAs. How many documents exist in .doc(x), .xls(x), and .ppt(x) files? I can send a document in any of those formats to almost anyone in the world and expect it to be opened. What fraction of PC users can open a .odt file? That's the realistic definition of standard.

the older versions of MS Office, which currently out number the the MSO 2007 and MSO 2010 - also the versions in MSO 2007 is NOT the same as MSO 2010 due to the legal case MS lost on the code.

MS may be using their money to try and force there stuff down people's throats, but they're losing ground with each attempt. The only reason they included the ability to use the Open Document Standards in MSO was because the US Dept of Admin Services told them they had to or they could not sell to US Gov't agencies as they needed that format to deal with the rest of the world.

An earlier posting said later versions of Office cannot open old documents. Not true. Office 2013 can open documents as old as Office 97 and Works 6, and can save them in those old formats.

That pre-dates OO.org, and for Microsoft if you really need to go farther back than that you can keep an old system running just to convert documents to Office 97 or later.

In the other direction Microsoft has free downloads for Office 2000, XP(2002), and 2003 for Windows and 2004 for Mac that will open OpenXML files created by Office 2007 and later. I have many clients using those and none have had any trouble.

I also know Windows and Linux users who use LIbreOffice. They all use Microsoft default formats because that's what the majority of the world understands.

US Federal and State agencies might specify support for ODF formats, but that doesn't mean they get used, and Microsoft Office supports ODF formats in addition to their own.

I have used MSO 2010 and every version of MS Word and Excel prior to that. I know that MSO 2003, 2007, and 2010 could NOT open any documents saved in any version of Word or Excel prior to MSO 97 without getting extra apps downloaded and installed, yet Open Office and Libre Office can do so with the basic install. The reason for the problems was deliberately introduced changes in the formats by Microsoft that provided no benefit to the user. Like a lot of people I have documents created in version of Word and Excel prior to MSO 97.

Star Office, later name changed to Open Office when Sun gave its development control over to Open Office Org (from which Libre Office is derived), has been around since 1984 as a multi app package. Microsoft Word was created in 1983 as Multi-Tool Word for Xenix based on Bravo created by people at Xerox PARC. Word wasn't bundled with other apps as a package until 1997 as MSO 97, and Microsoft Excel came into being in 1985. Thus, technically MSO came into being in 1997, 13 years after Star Office came into being.

I should not need to have to keep an old system around just to be able to read these older documents. Thanks to OO and LO I don't have to as they can do things Microsoft Office can't do or refuses to do.

Microsoft support Open Document Formats NOW, but only since the US government forced them to, despite the ODFs being the Approved Industry Standards for many years prior to MS including them in MSO.

I know many US organisation still use MSO formats, and insist on getting documents in them, but that the number of people insisting on the use of MS formats worldwide is on the decrease, and I think you'd be surprised at how many organisation accept ODF and how many now prefer ODF.

" I can send a document in any of those formats to almost anyone in the world and expect it to be opened."

Assuming they've spent $100, $200, $400 on the right Microsoft Office software. And as was pointed out, Microsoft Office has not been very compatible with Microsoft Office.

I'll one up the poster above you - through Office XP, Word saved margin information based solely as an offset from the margins of whatever the default printer was in Windows. This meant that if you opened the document on another machine - even with the same version of Word! - the margins/formatting could be different if the default printer on different on that machine. Heck, if you changed the default printer on the machine the document was created on, your files would then appear different!

Open Office dealt with this by surveying many machines for their default printer settings and then creating an average and using those average margins to open Word documents. The result? Often, Open Office was MORE ACCURATE to the original document than opening it with Word itself!

And again, you still don't quite grasp "standard". I can send a document in PDF format to absolutely anyone in the world and expect it to be opened CORRECTLY, regardless of operating system or version or what PDF reader's used. That's because PDF is now an ISO standard format and any developer can implement it in their products.

What version of PC users can open an .odt file? 100% of course, especially since they can download LibreOffice or OpenOffice among others for free. Since it's a sane standard rather than a dictated defacto standard, it's designed well enough that you don't have to worry about version incompatibilities or printer margins like you do with Word.

"Assuming they've spent $100, $200, $400 on the right Microsoft Office software." That's usually a valid assumption. Add to the high fraction of Microsoft Office users the OO.org and LibreOffice users and it's safe to say almost anyone can open a .doc file.

On pre-Office 97 formats I stand corrected. I knew that StarOffice goes way back but I did not know that OO.org can open antique Microsoft documents.

I believe your comments about margins, but none of my clients have ever had such a problem.

I understand standards quite well, formal and de-facto. Once upon a time there were formal POSIX and OSI standards that many IT departments were forced to purchase support for. Those purchase requirements were met, but the standards were rarely used. POSIX faded into oblivion before ever being taken seriously and OSI was superseded by IP. ODF and OpenXML are both formal standards, and I found it ironic that a prior version of Microsoft Office once had better support for ODF formats than OpenXML. Although more complex than any sane person would want to read, OpenXML is just as much a standard as ODF.

Again, standards are what get used. Once upon a time IE6 interpreted HTML and CSS far removed from standards, but web site designers used the IE6 dialect because that's what was used. As Firefox became an embarrassment to Microsoft, newer versions of IE were forced to be more standards-compliant, not by any standards body but by users.

As for PDF, older Adobe PDF readers cannot open some documents created by newer PDF writers. My clients exchange far more .doc(x) files than .pdf, yet they've had more trouble with .pdf files than .doc(x).

Sophisticated users and corporate IT departments can keep reasonably current software that opens any .doc(x), .odt, or .pdf on any desktop. Less sophisticated users, small businesses, and under-funded IT departments should not be ignored.

Some users need Outlook, Publisher, and/or Access, which makes Microsoft Office obvious. Realistically, the cost of Office is a very small addition to a business PC. On the other hand I just installed LibreOffice on a Windows PC that runs an inexpensive Windows-only application that helps run a business. She's thrilled that she can open .doc files for no extra cost. I don't know what the future is for OO.org with Apache, but both Microsoft Office and LibreOffice are good products, and both have their markets.

I missed the part where naval_z mentioned the exact models of printer and scanner he's using. Either that, or you're making assumptions

... about recommending Linux, much as I love it. The reason: those that might be interested actually want Windows without the hassles. IOW, they want Windows without Windows. They want a better Windows. But still Windows.
They would be the first to whinge about having to copy and paste something into terminal. The would prefer downloading and running and .exe or .msi. These are metaphors they finally 'get'... they're not about to learn something totally new, even if it is more robust.

I have talked to people about Linux when they complain to me about how "this is the seventh time my PC has gone in to service to have a virus removed" (and blame the kids). When I tell them I don't run AV software, they look shocked. But I also tell them I generally don't use admin privileges except for specific tasks... and they start to look bored. I generally lose them when I tell them I full-stop never log in as root.
And the Linux discussion ends on a quiet fade-out... they see me as an egghead - something they have no desire to be - not realising that by not having set up user accounts in Windows they have taken the first step towards letting the nasties in. And of course, the service centre is just going to pocket the money: Windows and ignorant users who wish not to be bothered to learn an OS properly - any OS - is licence to print money.

So, condition of wanting to move *up* to Linux: master your Windows system first. Then, we'll talk.

is ignored by fanboys on either side, and by commercial types everywhere.

GIve the most ardent unbuntu fanboy a headless server with no GUI, they'll loathe it just as much as a windows proponent.

Then there's the deliberate confusion between intuitive and familiar, which even different versions of windows suffers from...

When the other flavour of fanboy reads it...

I strongly dislike the use of the word 'intuitive' when discussing software. Windows is not 'intuitive' (especially Metro or whatever we're supposed to call it now). User have become comfortable with the skills they've acquired, not remembering their initial learning curves.

that's a major problem the designers either never learned or forget.

A classic example is the old nod of the head for yes, some cultures don't use a nod as a yes gesture - thus the whole thing is NOT intuitive or communicative to them.

Once you are familiar, then "intuition" comes in to play.

The idea that moving that oojah next to the big flat thing with loads of buttons designed by someone who didn't know their alphabet moves the arrow on the tv infront of you over a big blue e and the clicking the left hand button on the oojah twice quickly opens some other thingamatwatsit called a browser, is intuitive, is quite frankly ridiculous.

I like reading certain types of biographies. In one a fellow tells of when his group were the first to encounter a group of natives whose biggest technology was the bow and arrow. So, when one was handed a rifle and told it's used to hunt game, they tried it out and soon found they weren't able to throw it far and said it was useless. Pointing the barrel and pulling the trigger was NOT intuitive as it was not part of their culture, but it's part or ours so almost any kid can now use a pistol or a rifle as they know the basics from the cultural activities - although they may come unhinged by the safety switch

Keys were originally arranged in a more logical sequence. The problem was the original typists were too fast. With the most frequently used keys located around the index fingers, typewriter hammers would catch against or block each other. That's why the QWERTY layout was developed. Dvorak layouts didn't make sense until physical hammers went away, but by then existing typists had become accustomed to the 'intuitive' (HA!) layout.

...Ubuntu is like the AOL of Linux. If we're talking about real sysadmins rather than grandmas, they'll run rings around the Windows sysadmins who cling to their GUIs. MS looks to be making web-based and CLI the main interfaces for their newest forthcoming server release, which many are taking as admission that they've been wrong all this time.

does not make you competent. Being able to use more than one, helps...

Until recently, GUIs were sometimes the only option. It's not 'clinging' when there is no other choice, and adding options doesn't indicate there was anything wrong with the previous ones. Does the creation of new distros indicate the old ones were flawed?

Anyway, the tools used don't demonstrate competency as much as what's done with them.