this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
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I’ve found that Linux users will either bend over backwards trying to help or will call you an idiot for not knowing “basic” shit. Basic shit to them is something that is only known to 5000 people globally.
If you talk shit instead of genuinely having trouble with something, any hobby group will not take it lightly. There's honestly trying and coming up empty, and then there's the "I don't have to put so much effort on other platform X" kind of response that indicates you are just trying to trash talk.
My general rule is that i shouldn't spend more energy than the person asking for help because there are people that call for help not because they are unable to solve the thing on their own, but because they rather someone else did everything for them.
That was the reason I lost my job as an A&E doctor
Such a simple concept. It's surprising the number of people who don't recognize this, then invariably go on to talk about how "toxic" the community was to them for "just asking a question."
In 2014/2015 my little brother went to the arch forums to get help with his "Arch" install. They were very helpful. And then they realized he was using antergos and kindly pointed him to the correct resources.
Kinda funny in hindsight, but I'm extremely thankful they didn't tell him to drink bleach or whatever.
Contrast to circa 1997, and I got dual boot and mounting my windows drive figured out. Hadn’t found out about non-root users yet.
I asked in EFnet #linux about how to start x. The answer I was given was
rm -rf /. I said Thanks and rebooted to Linux.Ladies and gentlemen, that is not the correct answer. The correct answer was
startx. The answer I was given fucked both my Linux and my windows drives.That's unusual. I got chewed out royally when I forgot I was on Manjaro and did a dmesg dump to a Arch forum question that of course showed the Manjaro kernel booting up. Like unpleasantly so, and I've got a pretty thick skin. And it wasn't a problem that was particular to Manjaro, it was a general pipewire bug I'd found.
I avoided the Arch forums like the plague after that, just figured it out on my own going forward, even when I was on vanilla Arch. I guess it was a good thing in that I learned more troubleshooting skills than I would have asking for help. I'd still go into the forums looking for answers, and I'd see the same few forum users/admins shitting on people in the threads. It was sad.
Maybe it's better today, haven't had to fix much recently.
I started using Linux in 2008. A friend of mine on an old forum showed me wubi and helped me get set up. When he went AWOL and stopped posting, I went on some Ubuntu forum and asked for help with a problem I was having (WiFi had stopped working randomly). Those people tore me apart and spit on my bloodied corpse. It was brutal. Apparently, I was a disgusting moron for using wubi instead of replacing windows (on my netbook with no disc drive) entirely. It was insane. I've since discovered that I'd just found a particularly toxic group by chance, and that most of the community is actually very kind. But at the time, it was genuinely hurtful. I not only stopped asking for help for a long time, I stopped learning about Linux and computers in general because I felt like it was something I'd never understand, I was clearly too stupid to get it.
I was walking on eggshells asking about a particular problem that occurred on Arch Linux and Arch Linux ARM and I had posted the ALARM logs because that's the one I was using when making the post.
I feel the Arch devs and TUs can be quite helpful, but the users spreading the gospel can be the opposite sometimes. I remember a user saying Arch won't implement PackageKit because it was shit, but the actual reason from a developer was that PackageKit doesn't really work with rolling release distributions like Arch.
Archwiki is also one of the best consolidated sources of information on Linux, too, whether you run arch or not (I run arch, btw).
Relevant xkcd
https://xkcd.com/2501/
I'm a Linux System Engineer, so when people ask what I do I just say "I work in IT" and when they dig deeper, I ask "how technical/good with computers are you?" because I've explained what I do at a general level to people and have watched them get more and more lost. I've also dumbed it down a lot and people are like "I know tech" and then I go full nerd and lose them.
The duality of man. Personally, I’ve only ever experienced the first kind.
It's an elitist mindset. I have been around a few. I try to be helpful, but I'm sure I have come off as a different way at times.
I try to help when I can to pay penance for when I was young and an asshole.
🎵 when you were young and your brain was an oozing wound, you used to say "skill issue, noob" (you know you did, you know you did, you know you did)
But if this ever-changing world in which we're livin' Makes you facepalm and sigh
Help out a guy! 🎵
I've only ever experienced the first kind firsthand when asking for guidance, but seen a lot of the second in the form of online bickering not involving myself 😄