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.
If you talk shit instead of genuinely having trouble with something, any hobby group will not take it lightly.
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.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).
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’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.
I was a FreeBSD user once, for around three months.
I’ve learned everything about startx command that is known to mankind.
Tried that as well, around 2011. Not exactly a pleasant experience, with regard the HW support of my laptop. I guess it wasn’t FreeBSD fault anyway, to be honest.
That’s weird when I tried they supported normal display managers.
Given that I’ve installed it around 2006 from a CD disk, they’ve fixed a lot of things since then.
It was the time when spending a week to just launch some graphical applications was something to boast about. Some would think people even made it harder on purpose to filter out Windows normies. Thankfully, sanity prevailed, after those same hax0r kids went to high-paying engineering jobs and had to deliver a working product on a fixed deadline. Now you insert your USB drive, press Next - Next - Next - Root password - Reboot, and have your FreeBSD installation working out of the box and ready to use in 20 minutes. Boring!
Followers of capitalist projects, believing their “you are important” lies. And still dislike followers of different equally shit companies.
In our defense, nobody actually likes nvidia. They are a bunch of greedy patent trolls who actively stifle innovation with the way they run their business. And I don’t hate windows users. I just think they’re reckless with their privacy. As for mac users, I see them as cousins. At least what they’re using is posix compliant. Oh, and other linux users: if you’re using snaps, fuck you and fuck the horse you rode in on. You’re even stupider than the windows users.
Some of you are taking this a bit too seriously. I’m a Linux user and thought it was funny.
Saw on a mug: “Linux is user friendly. It’s just very picky who it’s friends are.”
“They ruined Linux!”
You Linux users sure are a contentious people.
YOU’VE JUST MADE AN ENEMY FOR LIFE!
The problem is that too many linux users use bad distros while criticising the best one. Some even use the wrong window server; and don’t even get me started one those whose who are mistaken about the aim of the open-source movement!
