When I first was trying to get into Linux 15-20 years ago, this is pretty much how it was. I can remember being very frustrated that very few people I encountered seemed to be willing to assist at an entry level; there was all this presumed knowledge which I didn’t have (and if I’d had it, I wouldn’t have been looking for help in the first place).
Today there is a lot more entry-level help and assistance. There are more user-friendly distros and a lot more information online that is accessible to the average user who hasn’t memorised every GNU/Linux man page.
That said, there are still situations where getting help or advice is a real challenge.
Yeah, i had a similar experience. I was messing around with a small Media Center/NAS hybrid running Debian, and it really, really wasn’t happy with the integrated GPU of the AMD A4 i was using, causing instability and tons of graphical glitches especially in video playback, which were not acceptable on a potential media center. My attempts to get help from the community as a linux noob that did not even have enough knowledge to know what commands i could use to get relevant information to add to my cry for help got me a lot of harsh replies before someone was nice enough two days later to help me out. We got it fixed together after a few rounds of replies, but my first impression was not very good.
Nowadays there are so many online resources available, and support boards often have basic information available about what information should be attached and HOW TO GET IT, which reduces friction a lot, and also makes the community a lot more accessible for new users.
causing instability and tons of graphical glitches especially in video playback
Flashbacks to me struggling to get the fglrx drivers working.
If you never got to experience the “joy” of that… There was a time long ago when getting graphics acceleration working with ATI/AMD GPUs on Linux needed proprietary drivers. It was a struggle, significantly worse than dealing with the Nvidia drivers today. Things improved so much when AMD released and upstreamed their modern open-source driver, around 10 years ago now.
Yep, that was exactly the case back then, and getting the drivers to work was an awful experience, especially since they really didn’t play nice with the iGPU. I for sure was way out of my depth at that time, with just enough linux experience to know that instead of “dir” i have to use “ls”.
I’m pretty sure that most Linux environments that I’ve been in have had dir for a long time.
checks
Okay, I’m on my phone right now, so Termux does, and it’s not an alias. The manpages say that it’s part of GNU coreutils, so it’s probably like that on all the distros.
The dir manpage file was added to GNU coreutils in 1998. Could be that it even predated that—I didn’t go see whether the repository layout changed at that point. But it’s at least that old.
Even that was not known to me at that point. most of my knowledge was years old at this point, and i do not want to say that what i knew at that point was even remotely actual.
Not at all my experience, I started using Linux in 2005, and Ubuntu was part of an explosion in available help for new users,
but also many smaller distros had it, like for instance PC Linux which I think back on fondly.
Beginner friendly distros was as much a thing back then as it is today.
The biggest difference is more that Linux has become better, and some things are a lot easier today.
Even Arch has an easy installer now!
The landscape has changed a lot.
When I first was trying to get into Linux 15-20 years ago, this is pretty much how it was. I can remember being very frustrated that very few people I encountered seemed to be willing to assist at an entry level; there was all this presumed knowledge which I didn’t have (and if I’d had it, I wouldn’t have been looking for help in the first place).
Today there is a lot more entry-level help and assistance. There are more user-friendly distros and a lot more information online that is accessible to the average user who hasn’t memorised every GNU/Linux man page.
That said, there are still situations where getting help or advice is a real challenge.
Yeah, i had a similar experience. I was messing around with a small Media Center/NAS hybrid running Debian, and it really, really wasn’t happy with the integrated GPU of the AMD A4 i was using, causing instability and tons of graphical glitches especially in video playback, which were not acceptable on a potential media center. My attempts to get help from the community as a linux noob that did not even have enough knowledge to know what commands i could use to get relevant information to add to my cry for help got me a lot of harsh replies before someone was nice enough two days later to help me out. We got it fixed together after a few rounds of replies, but my first impression was not very good.
Nowadays there are so many online resources available, and support boards often have basic information available about what information should be attached and HOW TO GET IT, which reduces friction a lot, and also makes the community a lot more accessible for new users.
Flashbacks to me struggling to get the fglrx drivers working.
If you never got to experience the “joy” of that… There was a time long ago when getting graphics acceleration working with ATI/AMD GPUs on Linux needed proprietary drivers. It was a struggle, significantly worse than dealing with the Nvidia drivers today. Things improved so much when AMD released and upstreamed their modern open-source driver, around 10 years ago now.
Yep, that was exactly the case back then, and getting the drivers to work was an awful experience, especially since they really didn’t play nice with the iGPU. I for sure was way out of my depth at that time, with just enough linux experience to know that instead of “dir” i have to use “ls”.
I’m pretty sure that most Linux environments that I’ve been in have had
dirfor a long time.checks
Okay, I’m on my phone right now, so Termux does, and it’s not an alias. The manpages say that it’s part of GNU coreutils, so it’s probably like that on all the distros.
checks the git mirror
https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commits/master/man/dir.x
The
dirmanpage file was added to GNU coreutils in 1998. Could be that it even predated that—I didn’t go see whether the repository layout changed at that point. But it’s at least that old.Even that was not known to me at that point. most of my knowledge was years old at this point, and i do not want to say that what i knew at that point was even remotely actual.
Not at all my experience, I started using Linux in 2005, and Ubuntu was part of an explosion in available help for new users,
but also many smaller distros had it, like for instance PC Linux which I think back on fondly.
Beginner friendly distros was as much a thing back then as it is today.
The biggest difference is more that Linux has become better, and some things are a lot easier today.
Even Arch has an easy installer now!
Ubuntu Forums have solved all my problems, past, present and future.
What gets me is when I search for the solution to the Resistance 2 installation issue on Ecosia, the gamfaqs snobs are like you’re new we can’t help.
Yep, I like the meme but the landscape has changed a lot