Not only is it the absolute worst, but you’re also using it wrong

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.

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

Holy fuck I forgot about this copypasta

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

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 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”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Me trying to get LLM tools to work.

Well there’s your first problem.

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