In a discussion with friends, I suggested that over the 40 years of my personal computing history, the ratio of problems against usage has increased. In other words, the time a user spends correcting problems plotted against the time used at the keyboard for regular use is greater than in the past. One way to confirm this would be to plot the number of posts (predominantly problems) in our forum against the number of active members over time. Is that possible?
That’s a quite wrong calculation. In the (far) past, computer users where able to read documentation, do basic research and have a good portion of will to troubleshoot and solve basic problems themself.
Nowadays, the most newbies do not want to do a basic research or try something on their own. Instead they directly run into a forum and demand a solution. That is the difference and problem with the “new generation” of computer users…
When we started our linux journey, such nice things like technical forums where a thing of the future…
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I intuitively agree with @hui but at the same time believe it would be interesting to assess the problem, although it does not seem very tractable.
When it comes to Linux in particular I believe that the overall experience has clearly become smoother and easier with time (over my 20 years of use). However, individual experiences and motivation may vary a lot.
I’m inclined to agree. But instructions are more complicated nowadays. More choices. And yes, online forums were not around in the 80’s but my users group met twice a month and there was always someone more knowledgeable than me to help.
It’s not a particularly useful measure, because the number of users isn’t a constant, and only those who have issues come to the forums.
It stands to reason that the number would grow over time, because the number of users also grows over time, and the number of components in the system has also grown.
Therefore, I would expect to see the number of issues raised to grow as well.
Then there’s also the proliferation of different ways people try to use systems as they get more comfortable with using the system.
Users with little needs (like just using a web browser and maybe 1-2 other small apps like word processing or an ebook reader) aren’t going to be asking a lot of questions. Those who are doing things like building docker containers, learning to write code, and similar tasks are going to have more things they need help with.
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We’ve abstracted our way into environments that are very difficult for even most of the intelligent user base to troubleshoot.
Modern DE’s, Steam, sound servers, just plug and play… systemd’s layers. All of which is to be fair, amazing -when it works.
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Well, in my early years with the opensuse forums, kinda early 2000. The forum has a never ending new posts asking for help each day. Around 2015 I started to notice that new topics are declining . This got me thinking that probably users now learned a lot of troubleshooting without asking or participating in the forum. My two cents. 
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There are a number of things that cause cycles in interest in Linux and inquiries here and in other Linux distro forums:
- Microsoft retires an old version of Windows and won’t support older hardware with a newer version.
- A new major component of the Linux DE releases (GNOME, KDE/Plasma, etc)
- A new major component of Linux itself releases (say something like systemd)
There are certainly other things that affect the ebb and flow of traffic here. New releases of openSUSE tend to see a spike in questions, mostly about upgrading (but not exclusively). A new distro under the openSUSE umbrella like MIcroOS/Aeon/Kalpa drives interest.
There’s no easy way (even with self-reported data, which is unreliable at best because the sample sizes are just too small to be meaningful) to determine what drives changes in traffic in online forums.
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@hendersj and #1 is next year… 
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