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Don't fuck it up, linux people.
Remember, if you are tempted to say "rtfm", it's probably because you're a cunt.
Make everything easy to understand, in as many places as possible.
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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RTFM comments are probably mostly about using the terminal, which is a good thing, since man pages explain most of the things pretty good.
The only issue with man pages is that it often doesn't cover common use cases. I know info pages often have that kind of information, but it's hit or miss it they exist.
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Indeed, only cases I see RTFM are stuff such as: how do I use the cut command to get columns 3 and 5 in a semicolon divided document? And even then there's generally someone explaining.
Now, regarding the quality of man pages... In maby cases it feels they were written in the 80s by someone who had to ship them as soon as possible and nobody ever improved them. Some commands are very well explained with examples and such, some have the options clearly explained, many just have the list of options without clarifying what the option is for.
Last time I ever saw an RTFM was when someone has gone into something that's way over their head to a point where it would have taken weeks to guide them to even get the relevant info to guide them what they need to do
Is it happening? Can we say it now???
Don't! You're gonna jinx it!
ITS THE YEAR OF THE PLAN 9 DESKTOP!
The what?
FROM OUTER SPACE!!!
Plan 9 was an experimental lightweight unix like operating system made at bell labs. I highly suggest looking it up, its super cool and wacky
The End is nigh!
Yes halflife 3 is coming!
I’m loving Mint
I know how to do a lot of Linux maintenance, but with Mint I very rarely have to. And it seems to be just getting more stable with each release.
I feel like we're getting astroturfed with Zorin bullshit. Never hear about that distro more than once a year, and now it's in a dozen articles this week
Unsurprisingly, it's one of those distros with a "Pro" subscription tier
Also, they have terrible update policy, with some packages still bring 3-4 GNOME versions older than the ones packaged with the running version
Also, they are advertising wine as a revolutionary thing to run any win app, just installing them via .exe as before
...If anyone reads this and still decides to ask me WhY lInUx iS nOt gEtTinG nEw uSeRs, I will literally pay you in monero so you can buy yourself a mouth gag.
I think im about the closest thing to a fanboi for the distro and even im like. whats with all these articles about their new version being posted in the last week or so.
They have doubled their users, they're now in the double digits. It's cause for celebration.
Keep an eye on custom PC build sites, for when they start dropping linux in as a OS choice, it will be spelling the end of Windows as a home based OS system.
I may get some heat here but installing LM Studio, (think a personally hosted chat gpt), has helped me far more than any online forum due to the sheer amount of outdated linux information. I highly suggest hosting a model and using it for most of your questions.
I know this doesn't help other people with similar issues, but I likely would have stopped using linux without it.
Many distros have pretty comprehensive and up to date wikis (Arch and Debian for example). LLMs have a lot of out of date info as well, even the big proprietary ones. I can see how they might help a newcomer though, with how bad search engines are now (ironically, a lot of the problems are from AI generated articles SEO'd to hell).
I do think ai tools can be really good for this! They often do a good job of explaining why to do things and allowing for follow-up questions, rather than just what to do, and what the manual says.
The one thing to be careful of is that they also sometimes give those outdated or unnecessary answers, just like the web does. It's worth asking the same thing a few times and maybe doing a web search for their suggestions to double check (it can still be better than just trying to search through forums, stack overflow and archwiki yourself without knowing exactly what to search for and which things apply to you).
Sometimes beginners in Linux fall into rabbit holes following ai instructions or online tutorials that suggest huge complex things like manually compiling and repackaging broken dependencies or replacing your whole desktop environment to avoid a bug when there's a much simpler solution.
It's those kinds of pifalls that lead to the extreme reactions you sometimes see from people who claim Linux is too complicated or broken or unreliabile or not ready. People run into a small issue and google search or ai tells them how to use a gun and they shoot themselves in the foot with it.
I did download Ubuntu for my main computer, made a partition and installed it for dual boot. Wasn't able to get my S/PDIF audio working so I'm still on Win10 right now until I finish some things, then I'll try to fix my audio issue again. Or maybe a different distro will work better.
Give Bazzite a try it’s been good for me
I was gonna try that next. Does it have better audio settings/support than Ubuntu? I noticed Ubuntu doesn't even allow me to choose sample rate or bit depth of my audio.
Eh, Ubuntu used to be a decent desktop distro, but they've made some… choices. You can do better. Mint gets recommended a lot, but that also feels dated. It depends on what your use case is. GNOME vs KDE is a lot more important, find the one that you like better because that's how you'll be interacting with it all day. KDE is more like Windows, GNOME has a more Mac feel.
If you don't want to tinker with it, you just want it to work and want to use your apps as is, go with an immutable distro (e.g., Bazzite like OP suggested). You can't easily mess up the important bits that keep it running and as long as you reboot it from time to time you'll always have the latest updates. IMO, unless you actively want to mess with the underpinnings of your system, an immutable is the best way to go.
Bazzite is gaming focused, but if you're not a gamer, there are others (e.g., Kinoite). But in my experience, they just work leaving you to do what you actually want to do, not fight with it to make it work.
Note that Bazzite-DX (Bazzite plus some tweaks targeted towards programmers) and Bluefin (basically Bazzite minus some gaming specific tweaks) exist and are managed by the main Bazzite dev project.
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tldr yes
Long story: by Ubuntu you mean Ubuntu with the Gnome desktop: yes. KDE Plasma a different desktop environment has more settings. Bazzite uses kde plasma with the default installation.
Thanks, maybe I'll try switching my current Ubuntu to KDE
Edit: I was able to get my audio working with KDE's GUI, I just had to choose "Pro Audio" and then "Pro 1", even switching back to GNOME my audio still works so I'll see which one I like better. I still wish there was an easy way to set my sample rate and bit depth but this is good for now. Thanks.
When you installed KDE, it must have also installed pavucontrol. Now that you have that app, you can access those settings on GNOME by searching for that name.
This also applies for other distros. Just install that package and you'll have that app.
I’m glad it worked out!
Backstory:
Nowadays audio is all handled by pipewire (no matter which distro/desktop) but the gui to edit the configuration varies, this is how a fix in kde could still work in gnome.
Audio on Linux, like all things, is a deep deep rabbit hole. Whatever you want to do, you can. Whether it'll be easy, or accessible through a GUI, or if you'll have to write your own scripts, who knows. Everything is on the table.
The best way to get answers is to ask directly in the community for your chosen distro. A lot of people just lazily post in generic linux/tech communities, like /r/linux on reddit, and get lazy replies from people who don't know, but feel compelled to post anyway. Don't do that.
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I would also throw CachyOS into consideration, if you're not hard set on an immutable distro.
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Maybe i should start doing it.
Sorry I am not in the loop. I have an old gaming pc that is still running Win10. Is that a problem?
It’s going to stop receiving security updates, making it risky to keep it connected to the internet.
It’s probably fine, but if you use the internet on it regularly you could get hacked, and if you want to run newer software on it, that will become a problem.
If you want to try a linux OS for it, I would strongly recommend Bazzite. I just started using it. It works quite well out of the box, and is specifically designed for running windows games on Linux as smoothly as possible.
Depends how much banking you do on it
0 I have a Win11 machine I buy games on and transfer them to the Win10 one. I actually use it mostly to emulate Win95 environment lol!
Not really tbh. It's almost certainly behind a firewall so the main threat would be vulnerabilities in browsers.
As long as they still get updates, you should be mostly good.
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The year of Windows 10 LTSC IOT on my spare boot drive has arrived.
That's the only change for me really
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