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Next time, install Cinnamon Mint !
If you’re a ‘new linux user’ then your only usecase is opening a browser and thats pretty much it. No PR needed for that lol.
i’d rather die than read a man page
Tldr is zoomer man pages and I love them
There are some useful manual pages I like to use, and there’s some that exist just so there’s a manual pages
i get that man pages can be useful sometimes but what in the world is that layout, maybe it’s just me not getting used to them but why write them in such a hard to understand way?
It’s a vestigial structure from Bell Lab’s Unix documentation which prioritizes brevity and precision. It’s like mathematics on Wikipedia. It’s always written by some math nerd in terms that only fellow math graduate students will understand at a minimum.
I guess in the case of Linux it also came about because the people using it and developing it were fluent in it, so man pages can follow a rigid structure with extreme amounts of jargon. It also made it easier to compress and transfer in the early internet days as a side effect?
Did Mom stab herself!? She must represent Microsoft.
Where’s the “guy, who can’t shut up about Neovim”?
I have been using Linux for a very long time. My desktop, laptop, and server all have Linux installed. I haven’t even seen a Windows system. in almost 10 years. Everyone around me uses Mac. But boy I hate man pages. I hated man pages for so long. I am. sure it’s a skill issue but I don’t care :)
Great for LLM’s though. If someone invents a
tldrutility that feeds man pages into a wood chipper LLM that can spit out examples for my exact usage then I will get down on all fours and blow that LLM until it spews out hot white gasoline all down my face and throat and someone tells me to run but I just look at them steadily, holding the LLM’s shaft in one hand tightly whilst flicking open a lighter with another, and then grin
manual? website? all information is on a badly organised slightly hostile discord server
Not even close, Linux users have been creating documentation long before Discord existed, and will continue to do so long after Discord dies. In my experience one of the most consistently great places to learn how to perform various tasks is the Arch Linux Wiki. It’s extremely helpful and relevant even if you’re not using Arch.
If I were trying to get info about Linux on Discord, I’d probably find myself getting upset too. It’s almost like Discord just sucks or something.
$ man kill
$ man wtf
Okay, but what the hell is the original lmao
A cover to ‘A 3 step guide to starting a new life’
No captions.
I use Arch, btw. You should have installed Arch too. It crashes sometimes and I got malware a couple of times, but most of the time, if I troubleshoot it just right, it’ll show me my desktop. But, hey at least it’s at the latest version and has the latest features so I can brag about it. But you should just use Arch, bro. It’s the best, bro.
PR are welcome
Frankly if more software was like that we’d have these issues so much better. So many maintainers are so protective that they won’t even read a bug fix PR and just close it.
Tbf, those are sometimes valid responses, the new user just doesn’t realize what they’re asking is dumb, and it’s exhausting to deal with when a bit of reading would solve the problem or show them what they’re asking is impossible.
One should always expect new users to ask dumb questions, after all, they are new at this. They haven’t yet learned how to speak the language properly to know how to ask the smart questions. Teaching involves answering the same “simple” questions over and over. Somebody did it for you back in the day. And somebody did it for me.
Not being able to teach and guide a newbie is a skill issue on your part just as much as their not knowing how to ask smart questions is.
I’m not really talking about teaching and guiding though.
If you look at the meme, one of the responses is something like “PRs welcome.”
I think that’s appropriate in certain circumstances.
You are correct, there is nothing wrong with a lack of knowledge or dumb questions. I’m referring more to how they ask their dumb questions.
Some newbies come with hostility, pride, and entitlement, not ignorance.
They request new features, say something sucks bc of blah blah blah, and then get mad at people responding rudely back. But what else should we respond with in this kind of situation? They aren’t looking to learn. They are looking to degrade projects, users, and maintainers.
They aren’t looking for answers; they’re looking to be mad about something and confirm their opinion that “Linux sucks” or some other such bias.
So yeah, when someone comes humbly even with bad assumptions, absolutely correct and guide, but there’s no point guiding people who don’t actually want guidance, ya know? Pearls before swine
So sometimes these aren’t bad responses
This. I had an issue a couple months ago. I posted on the distro’s form with a much info as I could provide and some real smart people gave me a ton of help really quickly.
Knowing how to ask and not being abrasive is really helpful.
Lol, posting what you read, tried, error codes, and what’s installed and your hardware gives you a very high chance on getting a civil reply. It shows you’re trying.
I used to be a mod on a forum for a fairly popular free program, and we generally treated even that like an information availability problem. Yes, we had an FAQ (and yes, sometimes even still people wouldn’t read it), but when there were a ton of similar questions that were all answered in the FAQ, we figured that meant that the FAQ needed a rewrite for better SEO.
Ultra-rare sane person randomly appears on the internet
I’m not even joking, that’s literally the best compliment I’ve received all month. Thank you.
With the poor quality of the search engine results and the fact that information expires I very much disagree with this line of thought. Bit of reading solves the problem when you know what to read and understand what was written. It’s very easy to spend hours reading all sorts of things (because you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for) and then discover half of what you read is now 3-5 years old information and no longer relevant.
I know how easy it is because I spent days troubleshooting why my USB wifi stick wouldn’t work. Most of the information I found was from when you needed to manually add the driver and was no longer relevant. What relevant information I did find, nothing matched the issue I was having. In the end I didn’t care to bother anyone with a 5 year old wifi dongle because I’d probably run into people like you who’d tell me to RTFM before even bothering to understand the actual problem. Instead I solved the problem by buying a new dongle, one that I knew had been tested and worked. But someone else might have a far more expensive piece of hardware that they can’t just replace on a whim.
Let people ask their questions and if it really takes just a bit of reading why not take that 5 minutes to point them to the right place? How many days do they have to waste of their own before they’re allowed to ask their stupid question that you could answer in 5 minutes?
I just get annoyed with questions that a simple 5 minute search will solve.
“What distro is best for gaming?”
“Will linux run on my (insert random PC specs)?”
“Why does (insert Windows/MacOS program) not work on the linux? Linux is crap then!”
“Recommend me a free antivirus software for linux”
“Why does Arch not work on my PC from the early 2000’s?”
Why does Arch not work on my PC from the early 2000’s?
It probably does though.
For real. “Which step in the install guide didn’t work for you?”
First page of results:
- “Try google, loser. -leetfurry1 jan 7 2013”
- 19 ads for random products.
Redirects to dead YT links
I just get annoyed with questions…
Oh, no! That’s terrible.
Context
I actually blocked someone over something like this =w=
An ex friend that kept bothering me for linux help, and would refuse to look at or read any source. Literally got so annoyed of them asking something, me telling them what to do, telling them the tools that can do it, and even linking sources that explain the tools, and they still message me with some rudimentary thing that’s literally in the first paragraph of the step by step guide breaking down each argument etc.
Some people just don’t want to try or be competent, they just want to shout “I don’t know computers” and make you read out the same steps you just sent them
There’s a phenomenon called “learned helplessness” where people simply don’t realize they’re capable of doing such things for themselves. They hit the limits of their knowledge and instinctively look to another human for answers, failing to realize they’re capable of taking the very same steps as the person they’re asking.
I’m not making excuses for them, just telling you so you know what to research to understand it better. It’s one of those things, once you know what it is, you start to notice it everywhere.
Im very aware =w= I just got tired of putting on with it, especially with the way they were treating me like on call tech support expecting me to forego my plans or use my free time to assist with whatever, whenever
At some point even if you know why someone acts they way they do, you just have to throw in the towel and look out for your own health
What source do/should you ever have to read though?
There’s probably an easier distro and solution for them
They were on mint lol. They just wanted to do a bunch of random specific stuff like transferring their entire setup from one drive to another, and then transfer the windows to a drive their linux was on, or installing windows apps that require pretty specific setups (which usually had install scripts made for them, but even reading the guide to how to run those was something they were struggling to do) etc.
I mean, I did mention a lot of alternative solutions and all that, but they weren’t always accepted
Sounds like they should migrate to NixOS, they’ll get exactly that, but then they’ll message you every time they want to change anything.
If I ever meet them in the wild I’ll suggest they try nixOS x3
I bet that person is best friends with ChatGPT now.
That person was in fact an LLM user. And I do believe it was specifically chatGPT =w=
Most of the time, the golden move is to not engage at all when you aren’t motivated to help. It’s either that or newbies asking LLMs instead, and right now LLMs are probably winning.
Just in case the search algorithm points people here:
“What distro is best for gaming?”
Most of them are fine these days. Bazzite, CachyOS, SteamOS, and Nobara are the ones everyone seems to be talking about, and the differences between them all are probably going to come down to which games you want to play and your specific hardware.
“Will linux run on my (insert random PC specs)?”
Almost certainly yes. I don’t care what the specs are, and you might have to try more than one distro for it to nail down the most performant one, but if Windows runs on it, some flavor of Linux almost certainly will too. Even Nvidia isn’t a dealbreaker these days.
“Why does (insert Windows/MacOS program) not work on the linux? Linux is crap then!”
It probably does, and you just need a good installation guide. The only applications I’ve heard of that reliably fail to usably run on Linux with some combination of Wine tricks have been Adobe Creative Cloud and online multiplayer games that use kernel-level anticheat. You may be able to get away with using some other FOSS software replacement, or using a virtual machine to emulate Windows and run it in there, or you might find dual-booting Windows a reasonable compromise. But in any case, those applications don’t work on Linux because the developers explicitly chose to make them incompatible with Linux, and continue to patch the application so that community workarounds are broken. Adobe decided you couldn’t use their software on Linux, this isn’t a failure of the open-source community.
“Recommend me a free antivirus software for linux”
Linux. You’re probably fine; not because “nobody writes viruses for linux” (as some jokes online suggest) but because the way Linux is set up is at odds with the idea of computer viruses. Linux has a much more robust permissions system enabled by default which will prevent random programs from running without your consent. Of course you still need to be careful not to install shady packages, but that’s true on Windows too.
Hundreds of millions of websites run on Linux servers. The community is very invested in making sure that they can’t be exposed to viruses.
“Why does Arch not work on my PC from the early 2000’s?”
Have you tried plugging your computer in?
works on <other distro>
I feel like someone tired of hearing “it works on my computer” is how NixOS came about
I know people hate hearing that line, but when I have done technical support it is highly useful to know if it works properly on other machines.
Preferably identical hardware is a good starting point, but if a solution is working fine on one machine but not another it can steer you toward other client issues.
Some user complaints of " it doesnt work on my machine" have been resolved to:
- user modified, or didn’t input, the correct environment variable.
- user is running a version of app not certified for that hardware config.
- user actually has no clue how computers work and didn’t realize the app looking for shared network locations only works if you are on the network. Or app needing a license server can’t work if it can’t find the server
- user isn’t understanding the requirements for the app output, so not providing the necessary input can’t achieve proper output results.
I tried NixOS after many years on Debian. I cannot go back, at least not on my server.
Why’s that?
Debian is great, I love it. But the ease of which I can repair my system when I break it is the main reason to stay. I made an error in my hardware config and I just had to use the previous generation to get back to a working state. After that, I could take my time to fix the issue without the server being down.
This whole everything is in config files is also very appealing, even though there is a lot to learn to get to the same level of knowledge (https://nix.dev/ helps there).
Can you explain the nixOS part?
The party trick of NixOS is declaring your whole system in a huge config file. If you want someone to get the same system, you just throw your config at them and it works*.
The ethos of NixOS is if a program runs on one computer using Nix it will run on any computer running Nix.
Okay but like that’s almost every other distro as of 2021
It’s called Atomic Updates. The idea is every installed program is complete with no missing dependencies by ensuing each package maintains its own. Additionally an image of each program is kept so if an update goes poorly and something breaks rolling back is simple
Chances are they have wildly different setup to the point that it’s useful for reference at best
plausible
As a daily-driver of nixos: basically yes.
Also Docker and OVA.
Docker’s like “well why don’t we just ship the client your computer then?”
Dude, we got two machines shipped to us because the other team wasn’t able to make the installers function. It was electromagnetic microscope simulators, so the team wasn’t noobs. Got 2 fat pcs.
Worked!
What’s an electromagnetic microscope simulator? For reference, I work in electron optics.
I worked on the visualisation and processing software for the Volume Scope EM ( I could only find a link to the successor here ) and the 2 PCs had the control and acquisition software.
A quite nice SEM, multi acquisition (you could designate several regions), multi energy (so scanning several depths by focusing the electron beam per layer) and of course the diamond knife 😁 to cut each layer!
I use SEMs, BTW.
This is actually why I installed Bazzite on my desktop and suggested it to all my friends and family who were interested in Linux.
If anyone has a problem, I’m already familiar with the distro and I can be reasonably certain that the software situation is pretty close.
“this specific issue wouldnt happen if you had just installed distro youve never heard of before”
But I have Hannah Montana Linux. What do?
Uhh. Install something more recent. I’m sure there’s a way to port over all the assets and themes. Not necessarily an easy way, but there has to be one.
I think HML was recently updated to be usable now
Consider my gob smacked.
In public?!
That’s my fetish
