Louisville, KY
Greg is a retired neurologist in Louisville, Kentucky, with a long-standing interest in computers and programming, beginning with Fortran IV in the 1960s. When Linux and open source software came along, it kindled a commitment to learning more, and eventually contributing. He is a member of the Scribus Team.
Authored Comments
Something we did with the Scribus project was to create a wiki, which anyone could contribute to once they got an account, and there was no significant barrier to getting one.
The gives voices to many users coming from various perspectives of usage and experience. As wiki articles become more refined and clear, they can then inform decisions about what to add or change in the official documentation, and in some cases, an article may be written so well that the documentation refers or even links to it.
I use Fedora (with KDE), but I would suggest someone new try out 2 or 3 distros to try to get a feel for the one that seems best for their needs. To that end, you can set up a virtual machine (on Windows if you like) with something like VirtualBox, then load a distro onto it and play around. The experiment of setting up a virtual machine, then installing Linux is good practice for the variety of tasks you want to learn.