3d ago

Linux is too hard

The indoctrination of windows is extreme. Windows is just as hard as linux, harder even with all the layers of obscurity.

And yet... linux is hard, and users decry RTFM as "not growing the userbase"

250 comments

RTFM is not a working formula. Because most people skip reading the manual for one simple reason, the manual is hard to read.
I remember my early arch days when asking a question about an issue I'm having was always met with a wikipage I already read but did not understand.
Rather than pushing for a magic manual, the best is to provide sane default or point to tutorials.
- The best is when people tell you to RTFM and the information you need just straight up isn't there.
  
  just google it and the google is just a reddit post that says [deleted]
  
  Or "if you're having trouble there is no manual, FAQ, or wiki, just join our discord troubleshooting channel" vomit
  
  And after hours of troubleshooting, you give in and join the Discord where you're promptly ignored.
  Or if you're really lucky, people are willing to help, so you spend hours more troubleshooting, often repeating many of the same steps, only for all of them to give up too. (As was my experience when I tried to switch to Linux Mint.)
  
  What were you doing on mint that had that many issues? I am genuinely asking because I have always seen it basically be bullet proof.
  
  Play audio through my mobo's built-in 3.5mm jack (without a significant delay). For whatever reason, Mint just really didn't like my mobo, and no one was able to figure it out.
  
  Oh, I know this one! Make sure you're using pipewire and use HDAJackRetask. You can reassign the ports to whatever, you can even swap mic and headphone if you want.
  
  Thats really unfortunate. Hardware support on linux is really hit or miss and until it is seen as a worth while investment to make sure that products work well on linux by the manufacturers it will remain that way but I can not fault anyone for going back to windows when things on their system just will not work.
  
  Or isn't deleted but either has no replies or replies that didn't help them either
  
  Those cases where the users didn't WTFM
  
  It's the same way you gotta ask if they turned it off and on again. Too many don't even look up the manual, now yes. Some hostility is just plain hostility, but the phrase is there for a good reason.
  
  Maybe if the people giving advice would RTFM, they'd know what isn't in it.
  
  That shit is the reason that I will never run vanilla arch again. So many people that are so sure that something that is not in the manual is in there for so many different questions.
  
  Git gud
  /s
  
  man 1 git-gud
- Plus I don't want to spend 30 minutes to wade through pages of documentation for a 5-word command that makes my speakers work.
- Aaaand why is that? It's hard to read because..?
  We need individuals like you to help it out. It's like wikipedia
  
  It's hard to read because people lack background knowledge. Man pages were horrible for my first 15 years or so.
  Once you have the skills that you hardly need to read them they're fine.
  That's why everyone wants to look it up on stack exchange, they want the answer, not an unending series of lessons
  
  Man pages are still not great on Linux. Very few examples with common use-cases and explanations. I shouldn’t need to visit the Arch wiki.
  OpenBSD man pages are a delight in comparison, and really all you need to learn how to manage the system.
  
  tldr is the application you need.
  
  This is a great project. Should replace man for noob distros.
  
  They are hard to read because they are written to explain concepts to people who already understand them. Handy if you just need them for reference. Useless if you are trying to learn. Which is why RTFM is often bad advice
  
  I'm currently trying to migrate my stack on my VPS from docker to podman. Bonus points if I get it running rootless.
  Somehow, podman compose just wouldn't work with my existing docker compose file. I quickly found out that podman has many options, but quadlets are preferred. It took me a while to understand what they even are and their concept. I did get the idea and the concept from the docs, but everything else was demonstrating how to set up a very simple one (think a hello world container). Or I found some blog posts with ready made complex examples for some random stacks that were way over my head. But a simple tutorial on how to map the fields/parts of a docker compose to a .container, .network or .volume file for my stack consisting of several containers in a few networks with a reverse proxy in front of it? Nope.
  I'm the end I found podlet and used that to convert a docker-compose. While the result wasn't completely working (e.g. a problem with some environment vars that got passed and switched in a few "layers" that podlet understandably messed up), it was enough to understand all of it with the docs and complete the quadlet. Now I just need to experiment with the rootless part.
  Currently, my first and foremost pet peeve is, that different distros use different approaches and utilities, but many blog posts or guides don't tell you what distro they're for. If you google the problem and find the fourth guide on how to solve it and realize halfway through, that it's again e.g. for Debian based systems, while you're running on SUSE or RedHat or Arch or.... can be very frustrating.
  
  Is there no tutorial for mapping docker compose into .container, .network, .volume file at all? That's unbelievable, one would expect there surely is one.
  
  Maybe I didn't search right, but since I found podlet first, while looking for a tutorial, I was lazy and gave it a try. It's result was enough to get me there. Maybe, had I completely read the podlet docs and checked all optional arguments, o could have gotten a perfect result. But that way, I learned better about quadlets.
  
  It's hard to read because it's a manual made for technical users.
  On Linux most of the software is made by freelance developers who often forget that all users are not technical and even if they are they don't want to be forced to interact with technical stuff. For the same reason I don't want to daily-drive gentoo, sometimes I don't want to read the manual.
  I happen to be a contributor on multiple FOSS project and most didn't have a docs directory in their repo or website, let alone an user guide. That's fine for a CLI program to rely on wiki/manuals but graphical apps should have a user guide on their website. Working on documentation is a thankless job in FOSS spaces.
- Then people need to be taught how to read better. Not Linux's fault the education system was dismantled over the years.
  
  What an arrogant comment 😂

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