I find that the docs usually consist of a quick start guide covering some ultra tight scenario that doesn’t apply to most people, and reference material that’s just some total brain dump of every possible command without any kind of context.

I have found the docs the best place to start with anything, but have found that some don’t know how to write good documentation.

Also man pages and the tools own help -? Or -h

If you run something that has pants docs, you could always see if there is a way to help update it

Nothing teaches you what the documentation says like plowing ahead without reading it, fucking something up badly, having to crawl back to the documentation hat in hand and actually read it.

Lol reading the source has trained me to try reading the documentation.

If it’s good, it’ll save hours or crawling through code.

If documentation is written in a readable and confluent way, RTFM isn’t such a big deal. The issue comes with overly draconian and non-confluent documentation.

well I’d read the documentation if websearch wasn’t so shoddy that I could find it in the first place /s

Oh it happens to the best of us. I was working on a simple cron the other day with the cron string that would insert the cron into my cron config something like ‘echo’ and the normal string you’d recognize, and ended with a ‘-’. I wasn’t paying attention and issued the command which did insert itself into the cron config, but in a manner in which I didn’t want. It replaced the whole cron file with that one string. #$@^$$ Luckily I have a cron to back up the crontabs.

I mostly try to read the docs, but sadly good documentation is pretty rare.

It’s weird that Linux certification requires rote-memorization of commands. The only people who make any effort to memorize commands are newbies and people studding for exams. You will always have access to bash history, man, and --help, even from an offline machine.

Every command I’ve memorized is simply the natural process of repetition. Is that your experience?

I prefer to raw dog it first, break it, then tuck me dick and read the paper like the real alpha male

Depends on what I am doing. Walky Talky? Toaster? Dish washer? … Who needs a manual for that?

FID detector? I need to know several things before turning it on. New Mainboard? Why is the WoL setting behind wake on PCIe?

RTFM. …
… The last thing you try.

I had a boring manufacturing job with long gaps between batches of work, so I read every help file in Windows NT4.1. While reading them, I found a way around our IT limitations on which apps we could run, and learned how to write scripts. So I wrote a password protected launcher tool using a macro feature in a terminal emulator I had access to on my workstation, and then started reading the man pages in Unix sys-V.

I worked next to a technical writer for Unix; the Unix. One of the things we were known for, actually, was the amazing documentation. This guy and both teams of writers (that many) maintained the doc as their entire job. It was written well, it was spell-checked, it was accurate, it was accessible. If you installed the machine, it was on http://localhost/doc or so.

Almost all tech writers were turfed after Y2K. They cost money and didn’t earn directly.

If you notice a lack of good docco like you notice a lack of mentoring in code dev (I see you, Systemd), then we know how we got to this stage.

If you become CEO, just keep that in mind.

I do read the docs. Even before trying software, to judge if ot will fulfill my requirements… Rocky Linux is one such example. Great docs, I’d love to try their distro one day :)