It’s not even obscure, context dependent errors. I’ve had many professional system administrators not understand what “connection was closed by peer” meant.

But most error messages are in plain English first (plus some numbers and codes).
No, they see white (gray actually) blocky text on a black background, they think the machine is broken and go into panic mode. Instead of reading.
Which is kinda what you said.

but some people don’t seem to be able to read one goddamn paragraph ever.

I had a problem with my car. It felt strange while driving. Made some unusual noise. Then a bit later the motor warning light came on.

I went to the garage, told them about the warning light and what I noticed the time before, what I suspected and such. A short while after the mechanic came to me and asked for a few details, as my description “wasn’t helpful” and the repair would be much faster with more details that told them where to look etc. Turns out the guy who checked in my car only noted “a warning light is on” and nothing else of my ramblings.

So sometimes it’s also paying attention to what might be important and relaying information.

To be fair, techs don’t usually talk to the people who can read, so they’re only ever going to see idiots. There are competent people in the world, they’ll just never need your help, so you don’t see them.

Last time I called tech support, it was for a Dell, and I interrupted their speech to tell them I already looked up the diagnostic. They asked which numbers were lit on the error panel to confirm I had the right diagnostic, and passed me directly to who I needed to talk to. I only called tech support because the cpu socket died and I was putting in a warranty claim, otherwise they would have never even heard from me because I could just install a new motherboard myself.

edit: speeling

At this point, if a student brings in a laptop, explains what doesn’t work, and leaves me to diagnose and fix it, I consider it a good report because it means that the student didn’t get any overconfident ideas. If a student also explains what they were doing when a thing failed, I’m giving them preferential treatment.

Then there are comp-sci students who attempted something. I had one who disassembled their laptop and tore a ribbon cable. I had one who plugged in a random mis-matched RAM stick that turned out to be busted and wondered why Windows kept crashing. I had one who completely fucked up the registry. I had one who wanted to install Ubuntu for dual booting and accidentally wiped the entire SSD.

I would rather spend an hour babysitting their computers than an entire afternoon un-fucking something they thought they could handle. If it were up to me, I would restrict the crap out of their user accounts, but the faculty leaders insist, against empirical evidence, that they’re smart enough.

They’ll refuse to attempt to understand the problem then get mad when they get ripped off.

Kama Sutra?

Don’t fuck the manual!

Yeah, my parents were about to throw out an oven that would keep shutting off. I pull it away from the wall and boom, wiring diagram. Take out the ohm meter, figure out that the resistance across the temperature probe went to near zero when steam intruded through a gap in the crimp. 5 dollar part and it was good to go for years to come (the new part was crimped in a simpler, more robust way).

That or Google “<model> service manual”

Dishwasher had the service manual taped to the kick plate. It gave me codes to troubleshoot, finding the heating element died.

Yup, just got done wiring up an old washer to turn it into a feather plucker using the technician only manual!

You mean actual paper manuals ester-egged inside the appliances themselves? In 2025?

Yep. I needed the circuit diagram for my microwave to fix an issue with the light (kept blowing out bulbs rapidly). Turned out you have to pull it out of the top inner frame, after unscrewing the button board and top panel. Thankfully, was an easy soldering fix, thyristor blew.

All those safety warnings are useless nonsense, until:

This vacuum is not water resistant and no part of it shall come into contact with water. Do not operate this vacuum on wet floors.

Wash the infuser with water or coffee machine cleaning powder only. Do not wash with soap. Every 6 months, relubricate the seals with food and water safe silicone grease certified with NSF/ANSI/CAN 61 and NSF/ANSI 51.

Well, good to know.

Some does if you’re lucky.

Grok, is this true?

I’ll be honest, I’m guilty of using Chat GPT at times for stuff I know barely anything about and know I probably won’t be able to find through research as quickly as I’d like to. I always try the old-fashioned way of using a search engine first, go through reddit and forums and stuff, but sometimes I just need to use AI for a good first pointer

we’re cooked

And FTFM. Find the fucking manual.

And perhaps TTFM. Translate the fucking manual either from broken chinese-english or the tech-lingo + missing context information which is almost every manpage on Linux, making it nearly useless for the average user unless you got hours and hours of time to understand all the adjacent concepts and commands.

Unironically, if you bing Windows API related queries rather than googling them, you’re much more likely to find a relevant manual page that answers your question clearly. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google is actively worsening Windows-related queries to make Windows look bad and sell Android devices and Chromebooks. Another example is that googling msvcp140.dll not found or similar queries gives you loads of dodgy download this individual DLL here and put it in System32 and we promise we’ve not tampered with it websites instead of the page for the universal MSVC redistributable installer that’s the only supported way to get the DLL (and a bunch of other related ones) as an end user.

As for silly nomenclature, generally on Windows, API functions are much more likely to describe what they do and much less likely to be a town in Wales. If you don’t already know what fstat does, it’s much easier to guess that GetFileTime would be the right function to get a file’s last modification time than fstat, for example.

I have been told that the reason their publically available training, problem solving, and educational material is so terrible is because there is a secret printed guidebook somewhere that makes everything make sense and if everyone had it it could negatively impact the windows economy.

I do not know if that is true, but I have been told it and it does kind of explain why sites like learn.microsoft.com are so terrible that I would rather reread the world book encyclopedia 1969 edition from A to Z including the index than try to figure out how to run a single powershell command from the educational materials available on that site.

I just want to say I’m glad other people understand how ridiculous of a suggestion this is for fixing Windows problems. It has become such a low effort nonsensical approach because people don’t truly understand what it does and it feels like doing something. It’s the new ‘have you tried turning it off and on again.’ dism and sfc. Then when someone mentions how absurd the thinking is that this fixes anything but a small negligible fraction of issues, someone always chimes in how there was this one time where it worked for them. Perpetuating this low effort, almost useless approach to troubleshooting. I’ve fixed more issues with BIOS updates than I have with either of those tools.

1. It’s not impossible to learn if you read the manual. That’s how I learned.
2. If you need my help cos you can’t figure it out, pay me. I don’t work for free.
3. If you’re not paying me, I don’t owe you anything.

Fortunately this kind of thinking slowly but surely gets defeated, although we still have to fight for every inch of user-friendliness (and even modern security concepts) against elitists.

Unfortunately right now most documentation is still crap for average users, and people who keep repeating bullshit like “it’s better to provide CLI commands because they’re universal” (actual nonsense people keep saying) don’t make it better. The situation is so phenomenally bad that I’d outright assume Mistral AI with “Reflection” on to be more useful to newcomers when looking for solutions (on case a friendly professional or enthusiast isn’t available), because that thing is less likely to provide an outdated command for the wrong distro than a google search. Which is an absolutely abysmal place to be in for Linux as a whole if we want to keep the rising adoption train going.

Becoming increasingly rare and we are speaking on different things. You are talking about a manual that explains how to make your washing machine wash. That is important, yes, but I am talking about a manual that explains how an appliance works.

the days of a manual explaining anything like an error code are basically dead. Name one appliance manufacturer that lists anything beyond the most basic of troubleshooting (“turn it off and back on”)

Like go back and look at an appliance manual from the 70s/80s/maybe 90s and you will see a more robust explanation of what to do when things go wrong. The further back you go the more likely you will see parts numbers, circuit diagrams, or be able to order a service manual that has such information.

We expect this shit level of documentation because we live in a throwaway culture that has tolerated this pisspoor level of documentation for decades. “Oh the washer isn’t working? It’s showing an E-05 error? Guess we better just go buy a new washer” or pay the manufacturer $120 for a “service charge” to find out that code means the latch sensor died and it’s a $30 part that is a simple 5 minute job except you can’t get the part because they won’t sell it to you

Eh. I own a few old tools with manuals, and they actually have diagrams of the inner workings together with part numbers, some even have electrical diagrams with resistor values etc. All of the newer tools have a tiny useless “visit this website for more information” and 50% of the time it’s some bs about errors 1-10: restart device, 10-20 please contact a technician because opening the tool voids your warranty. I know dipshit, I don’t care about warranty cause I need the tool now or tomorrow, not in 3 months when you tell me it’s “unserviceable” or “uneconomical to repair” and I have to buy a new one.

LMBO, and sometimes it does come with a service manual, but you have to take the machine apart to find it like with my Samsung Washing machine

I doubt that day will ever come

You might be thinking of info pages. The man pages are just the instructions, feature flags, etc. generally, while info (when available) usually has a more general / layman description of the command with examples.

People don’t know about man -k because of all the man pages they should have read, they forgot the man one.

I think it should be the default if you don’t use parameters. A little usage help and the list of commands (with a “do you want to see the list of commands? (Y/n)” message)

I use the neckbeard to destroy the neckbeard

is the fact that people can with effort and error figure out how to do something a reason not to make it easier for them to do?

I mean

you can in theory write multi-threaded bug-free C code – just read the docs and the specs and the source of your libs and never ever do something that seems to work but is subtly fatally incorrect

and yet we still have golang and rust and many other options to do things more safely and easily

if someone wants to use Linux but doesn’t want to memorize the Hundred Mandatory Commands and Thousand Flags lest they accidentally cat > /dev/sda, why shouldn’t there be a system for them?

Agreed! You can look elsewhere, and that’s how I, and I think many other folks, learned. The OP was talking about the manuals though, specifically mentioning /usr/bin. So to restate my point is not to say it’s impossible to learn linux, but that man pages are weird and bad place to push folks looking to learn.

Agreed, and I think a larger part of it is that most folks pick it up based on context after long enough, so it’s rarely explained. The square brackets are optional arguments. So I could use ssh 192.168.1.1 or ssh postimo@192.168.1.1 with the first asking for the account after I connect, and the second just asking for the password. You can see how the computer took it in the response you got. hostname ]192.168.1.1 being it saw the @ and assumed everything after was the hostname and included the ]

It’s worth noting that you can’t just connect to a random machine like this, they need to also be running an ssh server. But I wouldn’t expect you to know that without reading a great deal more of the documentation 🫠

You get to learn the notation conventions with <> and [] fairly early on. Maybe a very new user would make that mistake. If he doesn’t get it fairly quick, maybe computers aren’t for him.