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
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.
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.
I've never had to do that and I've used plenty of Nvidia cards, assuming we're talking Windows.
This man has never played crysis.
I played the first one when it came out. Never finished though. Didn't hold my interest.
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 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.
I feel like someone tired of hearing “it works on my computer” is how NixOS came about
Also Docker and OVA.
Docker’s like “well why don’t we just ship the client your computer then?”
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).
As a daily-driver of nixos: basically yes.
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:
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.
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.
"this specific issue wouldnt happen if you had just installed distro youve never heard of before"
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
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
What a weird comment. That's like saying using the window wipers is using the car wrong. Sure you can go without but when your shit crashes because you thought you were cool not using them you learn they serve an important purpose even though it may not be what seems to be the primary goal.
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”
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).
A miserable little pile of documentation.
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.
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
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.
Or all your problems are actually easy to figure out, and therefore quick and easy to post about.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not even joking, that's literally the best compliment I've received all month. Thank you.
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.
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.
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
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.
That’s my fetish
In public?!
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.
my personal experience with nobara was like this. i couldnt find info when looking for something
disclaimer: i might just have been to stupid
Flatpak addressed one problem, but at tremendous cost.
I installed Mint the other day and for fun I went to the software store. I needed Qbittorrent so I hit download and got a prompt to download 4 gigabytes to install it. The .deb is 8 megabytes. In what world is that an acceptable solution?
Yikes, that seems like an extreme case.
I understand qbittorent is a complicated piece of software, but does it really need 4 gigs of dynamic libraries or did flatpak really fuck up here?
I think a lot of it is a one time installation for a lot of the core flatpak libraries. So if I were to install a second flatpak, the download sizes would be a lot smaller. But the first package has a really big download.
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.”
”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.
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
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.
What do you mean you didn't learn assembly and compile your own kernel? Did you not read the forum rules?
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?
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.
If customers want it, I gotta do it. Can't force my beliefs and ethics on them or I'm not getting paid lmao.
"I might be homeless and starved to death, but at least I didn't work with LLMs!"
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.
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 tldr utility 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
$ man kill
$ man wtf
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?"
For real. "Which step in the install guide didn't work for you?"
Redirects to dead YT links
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.
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.
I just get annoyed with questions...
Oh, no! That's terrible.
Context
Where's the "guy, who can't shut up about Neovim"?
@lemmy.world
Hint: :q!
Community rules (click to expand)
sudo in Windows.We all have our opinions, and certain public figures can be divisive. Keep in mind that this is a community for memes and light-hearted fun, not for airing grievances or leveling accusations.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.
go to feed...
@lemmy.world
Hint: :q!
Community rules (click to expand)
sudo in Windows.We all have our opinions, and certain public figures can be divisive. Keep in mind that this is a community for memes and light-hearted fun, not for airing grievances or leveling accusations.
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.
go to feed...
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.
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