I feel like someone tired of hearing “it works on my computer” is how NixOS came about

“this specific issue wouldnt happen if you had just installed distro youve never heard of before”

Is that you TexStar?

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.

Easy there Eddie Vedder

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Edit: So apparently it’s risen from the dead and I missed the memo.

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.

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.

The only inaccurate part of this is thinking a Marine is using Linux. Been around service members my whole life. Marines use windows, air Force folks use Mac, and army soldiers end up on Linux. Lol

Holy fuck I forgot about this copypasta

Flatpak addressed one problem, but at tremendous cost.

And Docker. There are a number of ways of packaging complete self-contained images with all of their dependencies included. In the olden days, managing dependencies on a stack of services was basically a full time job, especially when you had multiple services that all needed different versions of the same dependency.

Of course, the downside is that it potentially leads to bloat when you have multiple containers running. If you have three different images that are packaged with the same dependency version, you’re effectively running that dependency three times. Compared to simply running it once, and having all three services access it.

It’s really just a trade-off between convenience and efficiency, and most modern hardware is probably capable of handling a little bit of container bloat. Containers effectively take the modern AAA game dev approach of “we don’t need to make it ultra efficient or worry too much about compressing file sizes, because modern hardware will be able to handle it even if it’s inefficient. If users can’t boot it, we can just tell them to use better hardware.”

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

Me trying to get LLM tools to work.

Well there’s your first problem.

I think the problem is, ironically, trying to use programmers for this. Not only are most of them opposed to vibe-coding out of principle; they work in ivory towers of pure math and can’t seem to wrap their heads around the real world and real users being random; they also have surprisingly little respect for deterministic behavior, statistics, reproducibility, controlled environments, ACID, CAP theorem, you name it, they just don’t give a shit as long as they can play with code.

Should use QA people instead. Their entire work revolves around getting reproducible results; they don’t mind what tools they use to get there; they’re not burdened by preconcieved dellusions of grandeur about knowing how to program; and they understand that the real world can be unpredictable.

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Why does Arch not work on my PC from the early 2000’s?

It probably does though.

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

First page of results:

• “Try google, loser. -leetfurry1 jan 7 2013”

• 19 ads for random products.

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?

I just get annoyed with questions…

Oh, no! That’s terrible.

What do you mean you didn’t learn assembly and compile your own kernel? Did you not read the forum rules?