This is where it gets difficult - because ‘Community helpers’ are often people who feel a compulsion to help people, and so it really can cause friction… hence the rant. It’s not easy to ‘step back’ from your daily reward of helping folks… I mean - that’s how they get ‘paid’, just the personal satisfaction of it.
I spent time creating notes - from stupid basic things about ‘tips’ on how to format/paste code in a forum to introductions and guides… but then there are times when people post and then ignore requests for basic information, or ignore steps they are asked to take (basic stuff like - 1. did you create a new USER? 2. Paste your inxi output).
That’s not being nOObish, that’s just being plain ignorant.
Fortunately, there’s usually enough reward in the remaining folks to make up for these disappointments… not so easy on reddit though.
I’m just going to say, once you have your own kids and see them grow up to be successful, patience is a virtue. You’ve made it. Enjoy the rest of your life.
There’s always been some of this it’s just worse now.
Both of those have reasonable places. School shouldn’t be about memorization. Open book tests are great as long as you are able to test the application and synthesis of whatever’s in the text. That requires more from the teacher/grader to formulate effective tests. Likewise calculators can be useful in the right contexts (i.e. once you’re doing things that are high-enough level, and within limits)
That’s not really where the blame lies. It’s part of the problem of course, but it’s more symptom than cause.
It’s more on big tech being hostile to end users in general.
Pushing everything toward phone/app infrastructure, where interfaces are dumbed down and for the most part intentionally not documented.
People haven’t learned to read the fine manual because most of the tech that they are using doesn’t have one AND often designed with workflows that are adversarial to the user.
Websites have been dumbed down with “responsive” BS enforced by google (via pagerank) to ensure “usability” on lowest commmon denominator phones. This has mostly killed off more information and function-dense web designs and made things worse. It used to be that the mobile versions of websites were consistently missing functions that the desktop one had (and I’d often view the desktop version on my phone for that reason) Now the desktop sites have just axed it.
Also since video’s easier to monetize and control resources that in the past might have gone toward producing quality documentation instead go toward video slop
Platformization has aggressively leeched users away from platforms like this (which are built to serve the users and provide both current info AND an organized searchable history) into monolithic platforms built to serve their owners. This means that content is aggressively managed to make everything transient. traffic is what matters. The only constant is that new people reliably have these questions - so the way you ensure constant traffic is by encouraging users to keep asking those questions.
Google pushing to gobble up everyone’s traffic by being an answer machine instead of a search engine
Microsoft’s obsession over decades to dumb down the PC starting with junk like Windows 8
Every frickin’ site throwing these godforesaken chatbots in our faces
It’s not at all unreasonable to ask and I think for the most part it’s clear who’s working in good faith to understand things and work together to solve problems vs. demanding someone else put in those hours of fiddling to solve their problem. It’s a big jump from windows and the Arch Wiki is great but especially so if you already mostly know what you’re doing.
When you started with Linux, the only people coming to forums (or back then actually IRC) were tinkerers. Now it’s more open to the public, especially now that more people are fed up with Windows.
You’re the generation that taught themselves how to use computers, likely taught your elders how to use computers and now the weird part is, that you’re teaching younger generations how to use computers. At least that’s how it’s for me and I’m the same age.
At first I was baffled how little younger generations knew about computers, but I think that’s an effect of the iPhone/iOS.
The mindset of negativity (“the world is turning to Idiocracy”) isn’t healthy. Ignore the posts that increase your blood pressure and focus on something that’s fun.
Especially now that people can ask LLMs for help, let them
Sorry dude, but your community obsession is like a thing that makes you average. There may be better results with community but with how it goes usually, doesn’t matter. Looks like a government grow.
What? My obsession when people used to be able to search and figure things out? My fucking bad I’m sick and tired of the bot posts and stupid fucking AI. I’m wrong for just saying something about how frustrating it is. Yeah, alright guy. You are part of the problem, continue walking down the road bud.
Is it any surprising? That people which were distant from technologies for years are slowly approaching them? Some people need 10-15 years to slowly start to realize they’re wrong in life decisions (or politics), but they’re quite poor and late at it. So keep up dude.
You are committing the crime of not suffering fools gladly.
It’s often exhausting - unfiltered, learned helplessness…
The endless repetition of essentially the same question, without any hint of information or clues…
90% of my marked solutions are ‘synchronise your system properly, create a new user, clean up your config’ style answers… I don’t actually think, or write those - I copy/paste from a clipboard… it’s really that dumb.
No backup, no snapshot, no hope…
Especially in a technical forum, as we have here, a certain amount of bluntness is totally appropriate.
We just need to walk the fine line between ‘tough love teaching them to fish’ and ‘performative gatekeeping’.
I replied to you earlier in another thread briefly addressing your thoughts. I agree with your frustration regarding the poor problem-solving skills that people seem to have.
I do think that it is due to the fast and transient nature of modern online forums, which aren’t quite built for highly structured posting like you’d see in a forum with permanent threads causing a cultural shift in how people approach posting. We are also at a point where a lot more people are looking at leaving Windows due to All The Reasons, so we are seeing more people that don’t have any experience with Linux coming from that posting style. While probably not as much the case here, they are also just more stupid kids saying stupid shit online too.
I also mention that I think forums are a lot less toxic than they used to be (At least the ones I choose to spend any time in: I have seen and heard nothing good about Facebook comments and the comments section of Youtube. I also happened across the comments of WCCF tech recently and I have to imagine that is just where all the troll farm bots get sent. ), which I think a good thing and certainly has improved the state of a lot of them, but I believe it was also acting as a bit of a gatekeeper towards people that would make a Bad Post and keeping them away.
Actually doing a bit of legwork, using using search engines. the search function on forums, reading the wiki and using LLMs to at least do a bit of the legwork should be something that people turn to first before they create a post on a forum for a question that is already answered. Edit: As someone else mentioned, this is also just quite rude.
I don’t like posting in a lot of forums because you never can know who someone is and whether or how you should approach them. What level of knowledge does the person I’m talking to have? Am just talking to someone that has no knowledge whatsoever? Am I talking to someone that doesn’t even understand me? Are they putting any attempt into the conversation? Is this just someone automating posting?
In addition with the influx of new people that have only been on windows are switching over, I’m sure more then half are overwhelmed as well since winslop just keeps getting worse and worse.
That does remind me that this is an Arch distro that, while configured ‘out of the box’ very well, is still an Arch distro that comes with Arch oddities.
CachyOS likes to espouse gaming performance and compatibility which is likely attracting the odd Windoze user that doesn’t want SteamOS, but still wants the support that comes from the largest active distro (Arch apparently). Hell, that’s partially why I’m here after I moved from Ubuntu.
I suspect a lot of users would be better suited to something like K/Ubuntu and Bazzite (Though I can’t speak to the user friendliness of Fedora), but end up here.
I wholly agree with this, even as someone who is either already “old” or on the cusp of it as a 27-year-old (at least in the eyes of young people today). It goes back as far as Socrates:
The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they alone knew everything and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them.
I’d be lying if I wasn’t annoyed at and worried for the coming generation sometimes, especially after helping out as a TA in an Programming 101 course in my university’s CS department. Having to teach people studying CS how to use zip archives and how to install programs that have a dependency was definitely a reality check. But we do ourselves no favors if we disregard everyone who comes after us.
I’ve always thought the Arch Wiki needed a layer on top, something like:
Step by step instruction on setting up a PC from scratch right through to desktop, but only explaining the why for each step.
For the how, each step provides links to the relevant Wiki pages, along with a couple of hints on how to proceed.
Separate from the Arch project, obviously, they got enough to do
There could be multiple layers for different desktops end-points (i.e. a quick install of KDE, or a lengthy involved installation of Niri with full desktop).
(Basically I’m imagining a graph with links down to the Wiki. Follow your own (guided) path through the graph.)
I’d just like to add that previous generations of Linux users were either a) Comp Sci students or b) tech workers. Meaning they were motivated to learn. There were fewer resources so they had to learn. They wanted to use Linux because they wanted to use and learn Linux.
The current generation seems mostly made up of people who want to use Linux as they’d use Windows or OSX. They want to use Linux as a consumer product. And much as I love tinkering with this stuff, it’s in no way shape or form a consumer product. These people should be directed (politely) to Mint or Bazzite.
Note, Redhat and Suse make consumer products, but they’re aimed at enterprise computing. Again, learning will be required.
