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commands and logs, several config files (some of which don’t already exist), or installing an obscure package that is no longer maintained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.
The difference between workable and non-workable usually boils down to whether I can understand each step and how they arrived at their solution(that is, can I fix my own fuck-up if I miss a step or impliment it wrong for my own situation), which I will know pretty quickly. That said, with my limitted knowlege, I can still spot the 50% that have no chance in hell of working pretty quickly.
OTOH, if a solution is succinct, upvoted, and still looks wrong, I’m at least going to look into the problem further with that as a reference point before I write it off completely.