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.
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.
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.