Clarification: Just making fun of people(including myself) who watch shitty videos instead of official documentation.
I really like the man pages, but they’re an encyclopedia, not a tutorial. Great for looking up specifics when you already have a foundation. Not so great when starting out
When I was first learning programming I had a teacher who insisted that the only resource we could was the Java docs.
When you want to know what parameters you need to pass or what certain flags do, it’s a great resource. When you don’t even know how to iterate through an array, it’s not the first place to look.
“How do I do X in linux?”
“Yeah so basically you just need to run this command and it should work on Ubuntu 12.10 (Last edited: Nov 2012)”
“Hey guys the way to do X changed in Ubuntu 16.04, see this updated link (Posted: Jan 2017)”
“Actually Ubuntu 18.04 is now using Y so you have to follow this new guide (Last edited: Jul 2019)”
"
Crossed-out outdated guideFor Ubuntu 22, please reference this Canonical guide here. All other distros can simply use Z (Last edited: Aug, 2022)"
“404 not found (Canonical)”
“How do I do X in Debian?”
“You can run Z to do X (Posted: Oct 2013)”
“Thanks for this, it worked! (Posted: Sep 2023)”
“How do I do X in Fedora?”
“Ah just follow this wiki (Posted: Feb 2014)”
“(Wiki last update: Mar 2023)”
“How do I do X In Arch?”
“RTFM lmao: link to arch wiki (Posted: May 2017)”
“(Wiki last update: 3 minutes ago)”
Did you know you can filter search results by time? When it comes to computer questions in particular, I always ask for results from within the past year.
Zero results found
Hmmmm
Then it’s time to expand the date range and/or try other search engines. Sometimes you’re just fucked and you have to make a post.
“How to do X on Y?” “Why would you ever want to do X? Do Z instead!”
Don’t forget the HEAVY Indian accent
Same outcome even if you read man pages
Hahah true, its a skill issue.
Man page author issue
A lot of man pages suck ass.
Except openBSD ones, they should be the standard of quality for user documentation.
Honestly I kinda like man pages. It is a pain but it is the least painful. And compared to e.g. the PowerShell docs, I love the man pages.
If you want to really learn what you’re doing, try
info coreutilsMy dryer broke the other day, which turned out to be the heating element. I watched a bunch of videos to try and figure out how to troubleshoot the problem and hopefully address it.
One of the videos, after an intro, claimed to have the solution. Then they proceeded to talk about the temperature control features of the machine and how I should make sure the heat is turned on.
That is the level many of the unix / software development videos out there. Just literally some AI slop or silly person who doesn’t know what they are talking about uploading a quick clip to grow their channel.
To be fair we do the same with windows.
You’re not a real linux user unless you’ve read the source because the documentation was inadequate.
I’d say that only those who manage to write a kernel code that doesn’t upset Linus Torvald are true linux users.
Even Linus Trovald writes kernel code that Linus Trovald doesn’t like.
For those that didn’t pick it up, this is sarcasm
Is it tho?
This is nixos.
ctrl-shift-v | yes
I really like the man pages for commands that have examples of some common usage at the bottom, that gets you kickstarted and you can just adapt your own command from the example.
tldris good for this.tldr for tldr lol
what the fuck is a man page
man man…
same energy as “moon moon”
whatis mansomething related to mansplaining… /s
its a giant wall of text i have never used that can be opened with the terminal command
man <othercommand>where <othercommand> is literally any other commandoh is it short for ‘manual’?
yeah i kind of forgot that word
Having a good
--helpcommand does wonders.There are man pages which do avoid me opening a web browser, the
systemdones are pretty good for example.I just installed
tldrto test it out tho.Man pages suck ass. But not as much as fucking YouTube tutorials.
Can someone just write a nice plain English instruction page?
You ask someone for instructions
They send you some bullshit 10 minutes long video
Now instead of ctrl+f or skimming the article and jumping where you want to go you need to jump around in a video
REEEE
I have a theory a lot of people are functionally illiterate and thus prefer videos as they can’t skim well
Or maybe they just grok things more effectively via verbal instruction and visual aids?
Isn’t that the same thing?
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