• homes@piefed.worldEnglish
      38·
      8 days ago

      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.

    • comador @lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      8 days ago

      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.

    • Ricky Rigatoni@piefed.zipEnglish
      103·
      8 days ago

      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.

    • kevincox@lemmy.ml
      5·
      8 days ago

      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.

  • [object Object]@lemmy.ca
    492·
    8 days ago

    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”

  • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
    294·
    8 days ago

    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.

      • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        20·
        8 days ago

        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.

        • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
          9·
          8 days ago

          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.

      • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
        22·
        8 days ago

        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.

        • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works
          10·
          8 days ago

          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.

      • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
        39·
        8 days ago

        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.

    • Da Oeuf@slrpnk.net
      101·
      8 days ago

      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.

        • Bluewing@lemmy.world
          1·
          8 days ago

          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.

  • KindaABigDyl@programming.dev
    286·
    8 days ago

    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.

    • ilinamorato@lemmy.world
      36·
      8 days ago

      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.

    • fork@feddit.onlineEnglish
      18·
      8 days ago

      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.

      • YellowParenti@lemmy.wtfEnglish
        12·
        8 days ago

        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.

    • Goodeye8@piefed.socialEnglish
      131·
      8 days ago

      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?

    • Bluewing@lemmy.world
      11·
      8 days ago

      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.

      • KindaABigDyl@programming.dev
        3·
        7 days ago

        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

    • AnimalsDream@slrpnk.netEnglish
      4·
      7 days ago

      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.

      • sudoMakeUser@sh.itjust.works
        8·
        8 days ago

        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?

        • chunes@lemmy.world
          3·
          8 days ago

          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?

          • sudoMakeUser@sh.itjust.works
            4·
            8 days ago

            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.

    • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      7·
      8 days ago

      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.”

  • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
    14·
    8 days ago

    PR are welcome

    Frankly if more software was like that we’d have these issues so much better. So many maintainers are so protective that they won’t even read a bug fix PR and just close it.

  • ZombieCyborgFromOuterSpace@piefed.caEnglish
    133·
    8 days ago

    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.

  • bizarroland@lemmy.worldEnglish
    166·
    8 days ago

    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.