Searching gives me the impression there’s a million ways to solve the same problem on Linux, and I find myself profiling answers into about four categories at a glance:
- Succinct: one or two-liner, a single config file, or just a few clicks
- Long-winded song-and-dance: Full train of thought interspersed between various commands and logs, several config files (some of which don’t already exist), or installing an obscure package that is no longer maintained
- Specific to a desktop environment or version I don’t have
- Just looks wrong
I’ll usually just take solutions from the first category, which almost always works, save for differences between updates and versions. Solutions in the second category also seem to end with a 50% chance of the OP unable to solve the problem. If I’m desperate, I’ll try the second one, but it often ends up not working, eventually leading me to come up with a much cleaner solution of my own.
Curious if anyone else does this too and if those one-liners are really better solutions or if it’s just confirmation bias.
Treat the response like you would of an LLM, it needs to make sense to you, you need to make sure they aren’t messing with you or have given you a fix that only works in their case. Usually the best fixes are the simple ones. And it seems like even with the longer ones you’re able to figure out your simple fixes which is awesome!
Kind of funny how quickly we’ve flipped from “you should treat LLM output like advice from a random stranger” to “you should treat advice from a random stranger like LLM output”.
Either way, it’s the right idea. If you can’t understand what you’re doing but you do it anyway, you’re going to create all kinds of problems for yourself.
Lolol yes, it’s a weird straight circle indeed.
However applying those fixes and then learning to fix it is a great way to learn how to troubleshoot and unb0rk your system.
In a round about way, that does fix the problem you have, though. Just randomly changing things or installing/uninstalling packages until the whole OS is borked and you have to reinstall thereby clearing the problem.
Doesn’t teach how to fix the problem, but at least they’ll get real proficient with setting up new system partitions.