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Did Mom stab herself!? She must represent Microsoft.
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
Where’s the “guy, who can’t shut up about Neovim”?
manual? website? all information is on a badly organised slightly hostile discord server
$ man kill
$ man wtf
Okay, but what the hell is the original lmao
No captions.
A cover to ‘A 3 step guide to starting a new life’
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.
Whatever distro you’re using is literally the worst one.
I know. I purposely chose Kinonite because once installed, I don’t do anything but install a few flatpacks, and then I never need to do anything more. I will never learn anything, nor will I ever need to look at a man page.
The bomb is atomic
Not only is it the absolute worst, but you’re also using it wrong
also you shouldn’t use that desktop environment that you prefer
And actually you shouldn’t use a desktop environment in the first place as you should be editing all config files manually as well as running your own compositor
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.
I first installed Linux in 1995, before I had a second computer where I could look for help. Compared to that experience today’s situation is paradise. So you won’t hear me complain.
Today’s linux situation is paradise compared to gaming on windows any time before 2015. I still remember having to keep multiple different nvidia driver installers ready for launching just to match what game I wanted to play.
There was a SoundBlaster Gold card I spent a whole month reading man pages and trying to get it to compile into the kernel.
Those were the days, I tell you. Never again. I’m trying to forget as much as possible.
I’ve never had to do that and I’ve used plenty of Nvidia cards, assuming we’re talking Windows.
Same here. I don’t know wtf that dude had going on.
Oh, I remember that. Red hat 2.0. Where you had to download the source code for all of the floppy discs, compile them, and then write all of the floppies. I remember it was 7 or 9 floppy discs, 13 if you wanted printer drivers.
It wasn’t until Red Hat 2.5 that they had pre-compiled floppy images you could download.
I went to one of my BBS friends houses in the early 90s and he had a giant book on how to compile and install Slackware
I’ve definitely ran into the situation where I fucked something up half-way though installing a new distro, then had to wipe it to go back to an old distro so that I could access the internet and find out what I did wrong so that I could start from scratch.
I hate doing debugging on my phone, but man sometimes is it better than the alternative.
Similarly, I ordered floppies for Slackware from Walmut Creek. Spent weeks screaming at my system for not being able to get a 256k Tulip VLB ISA video card to init into X before I found my first Linux BBS on I think DalNET… times were… different.
But the sheer joy you felt when finally you got it to work made you really feel like you were a real haxzor.
I do not miss that.
Is there a golden retriever labelled “random person on IRC with answers to all questions, writes a driver for you so you do t have to enter that house”
Is that you TexStar?
works on <other distro>
I feel like someone tired of hearing “it works on my computer” is how NixOS came about
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).
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.
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.
As a daily-driver of nixos: basically yes.
plausible
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
“this specific issue wouldnt happen if you had just installed distro youve never heard of before”
$ man man
Easy there Eddie Vedder
Back in the dim and distant past, when I first studied CS, we were literally told to run that as one of the first commands we tried. It’s an excellent place to start if you have the time to learn unix/linux thoroughly.
I should probably read that. TBH I’ve been piping longer manpages into a text editor, and I definitely don’t want to do that when I haven’t installed my text editor of choice for whatever reason (I hear sometimes you just don’t have sudo rights when you’re working on someone else’s system).
manby default usesreadlinecontrols which are basically the same asvimcontrols.
I find this to be one of those memes that’s not actually based on facts but on feelings. If you ask a question that could have been answered by a quick search, or asked a very vague question, then sure. Otherwise, I find that the linux and FOSS community as a whole tends to be extremely helpful and patient. Yes, there are assholes, but overall the community is full of people willing to help.
Yeah, I’ve found everyone to be kind, patient and helpful to me since day 1 - not a single bitchy reply that I can remember. Been using Linux for about 3 years now.
Yeah i like to think if you’re smart and ask good questions people are happy to help
That is the problem. If I knew what the right question to ask was, I would just goggler it myself. Most people aren’t even sure what system information they need to present to get good help. Plus few people are willing to spend the time to lead and teach the poor newb how to get there. If it takes more than typing a couple of sentences, forget it.
The people might be great if you’re chatting on discord or something, but if you’re just trying to Google the answer, results tend to get a lot of variations of these answers.
Yup, there are a lot of old forum posts that basically boil down to:
Lost user (0 comments/1 posts): Hey, I’m having a weird error and haven’t been able to find anything about it. Sorry if this is a newbie question, but I’ve already tried searching for it and have come up empty-handed:
{Detailed error description}
{Detailed instructions to recreate error}
{Debug level logs showing the error}Forum mod (1,234,567 comments/65,535 posts): {Insert any/all of the following: RTFM/This could be fixed with a simple command (without posting what the command is)/It works on my machine/Just run
sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /and go back to Windows, Skill issue, Duplicate post (without linking to the post that has an answer), etc…} Closing this post.I guess I’m just really lucky, because I almost never run into those. Sometimes I find the good ol’ xkcd DenverCoder9 problem:
Lost user: (Random Monday Five Years Ago, 7:00 pm) Hey, here’s your exact problem, down to the specific language on the error message even.
Lost user: (Random Monday Five Years Ago, 8:30 pm) nvm figured it out
<Thread was locked for inactivity>
But even more often than that I actually get frustrated in the other direction:
Lost user: Hey, I’m having a problem with totally-not-grombl.
Experienced user: Oh yeah, I’ve seen that. Just run
sudo grombl reload -skqq --xbs-juju '2793'and then restart your desktop environment.Lost user: Oh thanks, that totally worked!
Meanwhile I’m like…but why did that work?! It was a completely different package and there’s no indication why the two would even be related…? And sure, it did work, but I’ve learned nothing now.
Dependencies. It’s always frickin’ dependencies.
Or systemd.
Well, yes. There are many different answers to any specific question because there are many ways to accomplish the same task. That doesn’t mean that one way is correct and the rest are wrong. It is up to you, the end user, to decide which of the correct answers suits you best. If you don’t know, pick one and move on until you have to revisit the solution.
Except none of the answers in the meme are right or viable options to solve whatever problem, especially not for people trying to search up the answer later. Somebody might have given a useful answer once, but that one useful result gets drowned by these non-answers.
if you’re just trying to Google the answer, results tend to get a lot of variations of these answers.
Skill issue, then.
Your search skills suck. I usually get very helpful and relevant results when I search for a problem … because I know how to search for it specifically and precisely.
I used to, before the Internet went shit. Now it’s all AI spam shit telling you how to do everything you’ve already tried.
Or all your problems are actually easy to figure out, and therefore quick and easy to post about.
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.
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 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.
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.
