Never trust a Doctor on how easy it is to use Linux

I recently read a positive review of Linux by a man who said he was a doctor, not a programmer, and that he found Linux very easy to set up and use.

That’s great, but you have to take recommendations like that with a grain of salt. I’m not a doctor, but three of my siblings-in-law are doctors, and a fourth is a nurse, and one thing I’ve noticed is that medical professionals are extremely good at following technical directions. I think it’s a skill that comes from how medicine is practiced – you diagnose the patient, then apply a recommended treatment. Just like debugging a computer problem!

Maintaining Linux, like maintaining a patient’s health, requires researching a scattered body of knowledge and deciding how to apply a mass of conflicting advice. Both tasks reward careful study, and exact replication of the recommended treatment. For doctors this way of working is second nature, but I don’t think laymen will find it so easy.