linuxmemes

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 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 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.

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"

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.