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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”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Me trying to get LLM tools to work.
I swear to god those things are fucking HORRIBLE. They all feel fucking vibecoded and untested. Customer wanted some generative AI thing working, hired me, well pays the bills so I gotta do it, and the pip install ALONE already resulted in dependency problems and when I somehow resolved those, turns out that multiple packages are just missing. And when you ask someone, it’s like: “Uh it works for me” well thank you.
Just testing your fucking application before you toss it out in the wild is the least I expect from vibecoding retards.
Me trying to get LLM tools to work.
Well there’s your first problem.
$ man man
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).
RTFM!
works on <other distro>
I feel like someone tired of hearing “it works on my computer” is how NixOS came about
Can you explain the nixOS part?
The ethos of NixOS is if a program runs on one computer using Nix it will run on any computer running Nix.
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!
plausible
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”
But I have Hannah Montana Linux. What do?
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.I think HML was recently updated to be usable now
Consider my gob smacked.
In public?!
That’s my fetish
”Why do you want to do that?”
Those same people when you use an LLM to solve your problem:
What the fuck did you just fucking say about LLMs you little bitch? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I’m the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You’re fucking dead, kiddo.
This worked for me [sudo force delete root]!
[fork bomb] is a cryptic but easy solution.
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.
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.
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.
“Works on my system” and that’s why we have flatpak. 😉
Flatpak addressed one problem, but at tremendous cost.
Mostly solved, I cannot install dolphin mpn flatpak due to dependency errors, maybe it’s not flatpaks fault but it kinda is
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.”
Did you read the last commit on the source? It would have told you exactly what you needed to know instead of wasting all of our time. It’s called common courtesy…
What do you mean you didn’t learn assembly and compile your own kernel? Did you not read the forum rules?
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?”
First page of results:
- “Try google, loser. -leetfurry1 jan 7 2013”
- 19 ads for random products.
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?
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.
Why does Arch not work on my PC from the early 2000’s?
It probably does though.
I just get annoyed with questions…
Oh, no! That’s terrible.
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
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=
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
