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I read the manuals for everything now. I think it’s because when I was a kid videogames used to come with great manuals and half the fun was just reading through those. One of my favourites was for the original Heavy Gear on PC. that thing was like a hybrid manual and lore bible. Or old Flight Sim games with manuals that were as thick as text books.
Now you don’t get shit.
After a while it’s basically muscle memory so you don’t have to go digging as much. OpenBSD’s are my favorite. So well-written.
Yea I run OpenBsd on my VPS. So much nicer than having to wonder where this particular Linux distro decided to keep this particular config file.
I work in IT. I’ve read so many manuals that I don’t need to read manuals almost ever.
As soon as you learn the design language for stuff, it usually just makes sense where to find stuff and how to fix it. It’s rare that I have a problem that I can’t solve just by looking at it.
If I ever get stuck, guess what? I RTFM. That’s basically my job. I RTFM because end users can’t be arsed to do it themselves. If everyone read the manual, I’d be out of a job.
In many cases you get hired for having the knowledge and experience instead of just having skills.
Many linux CLI tools also tend to have similar names for arguments with similar effects.
That also reduces the re-reading.I dread the day the users read the manual
I doubt that day will ever come
I mean in general, “read things -> learn” is a good approach to life imo.
Too long and difficult. I’ll let chat gpt tell me instead and read that between adverts on Love Island
Grok, is this true?
I think LBD is the other half of it. If you have the confidence to try and fix or build something you Learn By Doing it. That eventually compounds and you could pretty much do anything. Maybe takes a bit longer than a professional would do it. A great shortcut would be to RTFM
I take RTFM more broadly to mean that I at least put in some effort to solve the problem myself. I googled, checked forum posts, read the man page, opened a config file or two and read some comments, etc. So I get offended when I get RTFM’d.
If you can’t reply without being a dick, then keep scrolling! Why participate in a forum where people with less experiece ask questions in the first place? That time could be better spent reading your shop vac manual or figuring out who you need to blow to save $700 on a dishwasher repair.
Yup.
What even is your problem that you’ll get worked up enough to spend energy spreading misery over some tiny annoyance from some internet stranger? Do you get pleasure out of that? If so, for shame.
When I get annoyed by some internet stranger’s conduct online, I don’t engage. I disengage. Life’s too short to get worked up over the little things I find, and we’ll all feel better when we don’t engage in that negativity.
Yes, I’ve blocked people without ever saying a single word. Sometimes while lurking, I’ll find some conduct (not beliefs, conduct) that I disagree with. I don’t then go on and admonish them, I make them “disappear” from my life, then go on thinking about what I should eat for dinner.
I don’t understand why some internet users are like this. Like it costs literally nothing to be nice. The only people who spread hate and insults online are those who have a miserable real life, so not worth engaging with.
Let me firstly say that I 100% agree with all of the above. And secondly, I don’t work in tech.
But I think most of the frustration from the grey beards is possibly because they’re burnt out. They’ve probably been answering the same questions their entire life. And there comes a point when the actual answer becomes, RTFM.
I don’t agree it’s an appropriate response. The mere fact that the acronym has profanity in it suggests it’s an aggressive response.
I’ve been on forums before where, instead of saying “RTFM”, someone had just linked me to the appropriate man page… Essentially the same message, but far more helpful and a much less insulting.
In my opinion it’s not wrong to tell someone to read the manual, especially if the answer is in it, but it’s how you say it that matters.
Well said!
One of my pet peeves is how many new things do not come with a manual and I have to go and find one. I am one of the fortunate ones who can learn by reading and then trying. It seems that many cannot.
or the manuals now are complete shit.
Yes in the 80s electronic equipment like TVs even came with electrical schematics in the box. Not really intended for most end users (repairing a CRT is quite dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing) but to help the repair guy. No extended warranty scams, no approved dealers get parts only. Just all the help they could offer.
Now there’s a one page leaflet in the box showing where the on button is and for the rest you’ll have to find the pdf.
Software came with thick ring binders describing every feature and updates came with inserts to put at the right places in the binders. Manuals actually were useful.
Yup, good luck trying to find user’s manual for Android for example
The idea that manuals in linux are a good way to learn and understand new software is peak linux neckbeard bs, and I will die on this hill. I congratulate OP on the exact type of autism that lets them feel this is an effective and useful method for learning new software, but if there is desire to have a greater adoption of linux maybe its bad to be snarky at folks for not instantly understand the terminal based documentation conventions of some dudes in the 70s. Maybe an alphabetical* list of all possible options is okay for referencing or searching, but is objectively insane way to learn or understand a problem.
initially when I was learning linux. I had troubles finding the command I needed. I could have first gone and read everything and then come back to try, which I did. But sometimes the man pages, the ubuntu and arch forums weren’t as great of a help as messing up myself.
Could there be a better way to document with slightly more examples: yes. Would it help: tons
But this is just my opinion, and I am just a noob
ssh connects and logs into the specified destination, which may be specified as either [user@]hostname or a URI of the form ssh://[user@]hostname[:port]
ssh [admin@]192.168.1.1 ssh: Could not resolve hostname ]192.168.1.1: No address associated with hostnameThat’s how I would interpret that part of the man page had I no familiarity with ssh. It doesn’t seem reasonable to expect the reader to know what those brackets mean.
Name calls people who read documentation.
Does not offer any alternative.
“No John, you are the neckbeards!”
as a professional sociotechnical problem solver I will join you on this fatal hill
like take the 4 types of documentation in diátaxis
manpages usually fulfill the reference need, and sometimes kind of that of how-to guides if you’re lucky and your localmanhas examplesbut that leaves more than 50% of documentation needs lacking
and discoverability is atrocious – you have to already know that the command (or commands) you need exists and what it’s called
one of the most useful things I learned in a linux sysadmin course was
apropos/man -k, which lets you search installedmanpages by keyword. but hardly anyone else seems to know about it – I only learned of it because a teaching assistant mentioned it off hand! – and even then it only helps if you guess the right keyword for your problemI am vexed by this situation
I think it should be the default if you don’t use parameters. A little usage help and the list of commands (with a “do you want to see the list of commands? (Y/n)” message)
THIS. I feel like linux
manpages are as useful as an Analytical mechanics textbook for someone who just wants to drive. Like yes, sure, it’s amazing we have such a detailed documentation but for God’s sake just introduce basic usages firstThere’s other ways to get info. And man pages are a great way to learn how something is expected to work on your system. And it’s offline, without ads, scams, ai generated false info.
They’re searchable and there are examples at the bottom of almost every one of them.
You might be thinking of
infopages. Themanpages are just the instructions, feature flags, etc. generally, whileinfo(when available) usually has a more general / layman description of the command with examples.Hrm, I checked the manpage for grep on my Mac an there are a number of examples. I checked it on Linux and there’s one example. I must be spoiled by the BSD’s.
It’s possible. A lot of things merge the info and man pages now if both are installed, that could be the case here. Or Mac just documents it further.
It’s a good thing there are other resources, then. You can read tldr-pages. You can look at various official and unofficial wikis. You can look at Stackoverflow. You can look at Youtube tutorials. You can ask other people. Hell, you can ask a chatbot.
If the average user is unwilling to do that, maybe it’s better that Linux does not see a wider adoption.
is the fact that people can with effort and error figure out how to do something a reason not to make it easier for them to do?
I mean
you can in theory write multi-threaded bug-free C code – just read the docs and the specs and the source of your libs and never ever do something that seems to work but is subtly fatally incorrect
and yet we still have golang and rust and many other options to do things more safely and easily
if someone wants to use Linux but doesn’t want to memorize the Hundred Mandatory Commands and Thousand Flags lest they accidentally
cat > /dev/sda, why shouldn’t there be a system for them?The community abhors change. Especially changes that break conventions, even informal ones. Look at the temper tantrums people are throwing because Wayland does things differently from X.org. Changing output redirection in Bash, or how
ddworks, or any number of long-standing conventions because new users are unwilling to adapt to a new system and might end updding over the root partition would break established workflows, and worse, existing scripts and services.But the solution already exists, it’s called wrapper programs. You don’t have to manually update AUR packages because
yayandparualready do that. You don’t have to figure out howfdiskandmkfswork because Gparted and Partition Manager do it for you.Nevertheless, using a system should always and forever be the user’s responsibility. Otherwise Linux would turn into a locked-down play pen like Apple products.
For appliances at least, 95% of “the manual” today is useless CYA safety disclosures in 17 different languages. Manuals today rarely contain useful information.
Until you do like step one of taking an appliance apart, and realize that the real manual is marked “for technician use only”, and it’s hidden inside of the appliance.
My washer and dryer both have good manuals complete with circuit diagrams under the top once i take a few screws out. My chest freezer has one taped up under the hatch where the compresser sits. My refrigerator has one hidden in the door hinge.
Yeah, my parents were about to throw out an oven that would keep shutting off. I pull it away from the wall and boom, wiring diagram. Take out the ohm meter, figure out that the resistance across the temperature probe went to near zero when steam intruded through a gap in the crimp. 5 dollar part and it was good to go for years to come (the new part was crimped in a simpler, more robust way).
That or Google “<model> service manual”
Dishwasher had the service manual taped to the kick plate. It gave me codes to troubleshoot, finding the heating element died.
Yup, just got done wiring up an old washer to turn it into a feather plucker using the technician only manual!
The actual manual is usually hidden somewhere on it for repair techs to find. For my oven it was taped on the back.
Yep. I needed the circuit diagram for my microwave to fix an issue with the light (kept blowing out bulbs rapidly). Turned out you have to pull it out of the top inner frame, after unscrewing the button board and top panel. Thankfully, was an easy soldering fix, thyristor blew.
Generally microwaves are amongst the devices I tag as “do not self repair” I lack the confidence in my repair skills to fuck with the machine with giant caps and built in death ray.
Appliance repair in the 20’s? WTFY (Watch the fucking Youtube)
query:samsung Ice maker stoped working
Hi, I’m jimmy from shadyApplianceParts.com Did your samsung ice box stop making ice? That’s a common problem. What you need to…
Honestly I have to disagree. All my recently purchased appliances: microwave, washing machine, dishwasher and induction cooktop, had detailed instruction manuals that were genuinely useful, especially where the finer details aren’t obvious from the device itself.
Heck, even my wireless earbuds had a little bit of useful info, like how to force them into pairing mode.
Of course, all those manuals contained those nonsense safety warnings too (and I read every word of course! :P) but that’s neither here nor there.
All those safety warnings are useless nonsense, until:
This vacuum is not water resistant and no part of it shall come into contact with water. Do not operate this vacuum on wet floors.
Wash the infuser with water or coffee machine cleaning powder only. Do not wash with soap. Every 6 months, relubricate the seals with food and water safe silicone grease certified with NSF/ANSI/CAN 61 and NSF/ANSI 51.
Well, good to know.
And software doesn’t even come with those kinds of manuals anymore.
Some does if you’re lucky.
The troubleshooting section of the manual is almost always useless because it only ever covers user error.
My washer threw a drainage error and the manual suggested I blocked the outlet or had done something daft. I looked up the error code online and 90% of the time it was a failed water pump.
I had to replace the water pump. It was an easy job that required less documentation than a lego set for a 5 year old. You just had to know which screws to loosen to get to the pump. Was it documented? Of course not.
A manual killed my parents.
Batman-ual?
Spoon!
I hardly think memorizing every useless fact in a manual and blowing the technician is the best way to learn. In Linux I encounter problems and seek the answers then I know how to apply this knowledge in the future. This isn’t dynastic China where we must memorize the five great books (/usr/bin, fridge, stove, furnace, and the analects) in order to progress in life.
OP may be a master of RTFM, but they clearly didn’t read through that passage before posting. Blowing the technician is a good way to save money, but maybe not the best way to learn.
Jeez, maybe the technican deserves a nice blowie, field work isn’t easy y’know.
chill out, it was 2012, the last time he truly felt alive
“I don’t have the money to pay for this
pizzaappliance repair…”Is that you step brother?
RTFM is an obnoxious retort for people, arguably in community, not to engage with a member of the community. I don’t mind reading the manual, but perhaps you can point me to where in the manual I could get further insight.
Reading a manual is also a skill. Being able to compartmentalize manual info into buckets of “obvious and I don’t need to read on”, “could be helpful”, “interesting, but it gets there I ain’t touching it” takes either training or just getting lucky after a certain number of reps.
Your second point is pretty much the most important skill learned in a humanities PhD, how to make your own learning path and learn what you need to know and what you should avoid.
Writing a manual is also a skill so starting with good ones help a lot.
This is the only comment I’ve seen in here that I’ve seen address this. The whole concept of RTFM is reactionary and ridiculous. That kind of thinking and behavior kept me at arm’s length from the Linux/tech community for many years. Still kinda does.
Fortunately this kind of thinking slowly but surely gets defeated, although we still have to fight for every inch of user-friendliness (and even modern security concepts) against elitists.
Unfortunately right now most documentation is still crap for average users, and people who keep repeating bullshit like “it’s better to provide CLI commands because they’re universal” (actual nonsense people keep saying) don’t make it better. The situation is so phenomenally bad that I’d outright assume Mistral AI with “Reflection” on to be more useful to newcomers when looking for solutions (on case a friendly professional or enthusiast isn’t available), because that thing is less likely to provide an outdated command for the wrong distro than a google search. Which is an absolutely abysmal place to be in for Linux as a whole if we want to keep the rising adoption train going.
I’m glad to hear it’s changing for the better but I lost my patience with these techie dumbfucks a long time ago. If people respond with anger or impatience at technical questions, I tell them they deserve to be publicly executed.
RTFM is an obnoxious retort for people, arguably in community, not to engage with a member of the community.
I think there’s a low level of “How do I figure this out?” [generic] in which its good advice to ask “Does it say anything about this in the manual?” before you try and tear into a system as a third party giving advice.
I also think “I read the manual on my refrigerator” is some “I dare you to prove me wrong” horseshit. On the one hand, people don’t do this for a reason. Refrigerators simply aren’t that complicated to use. And the manual is rarely a smooth read, even for professionals. So its good advice, but not practical advice, better than half the time.
Reading a manual is also a skill. Being able to compartmentalize manual info into buckets of “obvious and I don’t need to read on”, “could be helpful”, “interesting, but it gets there I ain’t touching it” takes either training or just getting lucky after a certain number of reps.
Also, just a matter of free time and mental calories to burn. And hey, maybe if you’re a hobbyist who is hip deep in your Linux kernel because you eat this shit up, its the place you should have started. But also, Jesus Christ, maybe I just want a Mint instance to run a Jellyfin server. I’m not trying to get my master’s degree in this shit.
- It’s not impossible to learn if you read the manual. That’s how I learned.
- If you need my help cos you can’t figure it out, pay me. I don’t work for free.
- If you’re not paying me, I don’t owe you anything.
If you need my help cos you can’t figure it out, pay me
It’s so funny to see this on a sub dedicated to FOSS. Trying to imagine how many Pull Requests come with a bill attached.
FOSS doesn’t mean “we think people that make software should work for free because we like free shit”. It means:
-
When you want to modify something someone else made to your benefit you should recognize the work they did for you and pay it back in the form of contributing those changes back to the project. Beyond that, it also benefits you directly because someone else might build on your improvements (well, that, but also its easier to stop your changes from breaking in new versions of the software if other people are aware of them). Like the other commenter said, its communal development, sure lots of people do it at least partly because they want to make the world a better place, but the primary reason it works is because the various parties mutually benefit from mutual cooperation.
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The belief that you should have complete control over your own computer, which you can’t do in practice without being able to view the source code of the software you run.
-
There’s a difference between helping out people who are interested in, and capable of learning, improving, contributing to something…
… and people who just want thing work, and are also almost always unwilling to put literally any thought into this process.
‘User Support’ and ‘Collaborative Development’ are not the same thing.
There’s also ‘the computer guy’ syndrome, where a group of people just expect a seemingly infinite amount of uncompensated time and mental effort from ‘the computer guy’ to solve all their problems, who then take this for granted, and become hostile and offended when you tell them ‘sorry, don’t have the time’, when ‘the computer guy’ has the audacity to… want to do something else at that moment.
So much this
Most people don’t even read the error messages. They’re never gonna read a whole manual.
Most people were conditioned by more “user-friendly” systems to ignore the content of error messages because only an expert can make sense of “Error: 0x8000000F Unknown Error”. So they don’t even try, and that’s how they put themselves in a
Yes, do as I say!situation.It’s not even obscure, context dependent errors. I’ve had many professional system administrators not understand what “connection was closed by peer” meant.
Well, to be fair, I’m also not very well versed in the intricacies of connecting with British nobility.
One day I’ll catch that jerk Peer! So rude, always closing my connections!
It’s very much on brand for Peer, at least in the beginning of the play https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_Gynt
More than once I had trouble calls about an “error message” that basically said “everything is fine, click ok to proceed”
But most error messages are in plain English first (plus some numbers and codes).
No, they see white (gray actually) blocky text on a black background, they think the machine is broken and go into panic mode. Instead of reading.
Which is kinda what you said.
They don’t.
Undoing self-owns like ignoring available information is the basis for 40% of the economy.
People who don’t read error messages or do not take the time to see what is going on and just come to the technician/mechanic/doctor saying “it doesn’t work” or some half-assed hypothesis piss me off so bad.
I know that at some point we all do a little of this in our lifes, but some people don’t seem to be able to read one goddamn paragraph ever.
but some people don’t seem to be able to read one goddamn paragraph ever.
I had a problem with my car. It felt strange while driving. Made some unusual noise. Then a bit later the motor warning light came on.
I went to the garage, told them about the warning light and what I noticed the time before, what I suspected and such. A short while after the mechanic came to me and asked for a few details, as my description “wasn’t helpful” and the repair would be much faster with more details that told them where to look etc. Turns out the guy who checked in my car only noted “a warning light is on” and nothing else of my ramblings.
So sometimes it’s also paying attention to what might be important and relaying information.
ah well, then that is them being stubborn and being unable to troubleshoot.
To be fair, I forgot an important bit of context. I was on vacation abroad when my car broke on a Friday afternoon. Our hotel room was only available until Saturday morning as everything was booked out for the weekend because of a huge event in the city. They asked me just to get a first indication and not waste time with random troubleshooting, so that I could get home and get everything checked completely with a more relaxed schedule.
From my view, it was a sensible thing to do. But the literal translation on their report they showed me was just “the warning light is lit” - not even which (though that is quite obvious, when you start the engine)
To be fair, techs don’t usually talk to the people who can read, so they’re only ever going to see idiots. There are competent people in the world, they’ll just never need your help, so you don’t see them.
Last time I called tech support, it was for a Dell, and I interrupted their speech to tell them I already looked up the diagnostic. They asked which numbers were lit on the error panel to confirm I had the right diagnostic, and passed me directly to who I needed to talk to. I only called tech support because the cpu socket died and I was putting in a warranty claim, otherwise they would have never even heard from me because I could just install a new motherboard myself.
edit: speeling
At this point, if a student brings in a laptop, explains what doesn’t work, and leaves me to diagnose and fix it, I consider it a good report because it means that the student didn’t get any overconfident ideas. If a student also explains what they were doing when a thing failed, I’m giving them preferential treatment.
Then there are comp-sci students who attempted something. I had one who disassembled their laptop and tore a ribbon cable. I had one who plugged in a random mis-matched RAM stick that turned out to be busted and wondered why Windows kept crashing. I had one who completely fucked up the registry. I had one who wanted to install Ubuntu for dual booting and accidentally wiped the entire SSD.
I would rather spend an hour babysitting their computers than an entire afternoon un-fucking something they thought they could handle. If it were up to me, I would restrict the crap out of their user accounts, but the faculty leaders insist, against empirical evidence, that they’re smart enough.
Are these laptops provided by the faculty?
In any case I do not mind so much the “I should try to fix this on my own first”. If it’s your own device and accept the risks/consequences. But if it is a work/university provided laptop then it makes no sense to attempt to fix it on one’s own.
I can feel your pain trying to fix/repair something you have to figure out what kind of stupid stuff was done to the device.
They’re provided by the faculties at the university’s expense, but the students have admin rights and very little supervision. Two fairly expensive laptops have been stolen by exchange students during the three years I’ve worked there – they simply never bothered to return them, and we only realized it during the yearly inventory check. But fixing the asset tracking system (or implementing one in the first place) is not what I’m getting paid for.
They’ll refuse to attempt to understand the problem then get mad when they get ripped off.
And because people don’t read error messages, many applications/sites/etc don’t even put them, or if they do they either don’t have any public facing documentation to actually figure out what that code means, or they do and it might as well be nothing
What about the fucking manual?
Kama Sutra?
I guess you get good at Unix and refrigerator by reading it, so why not?
Don’t fuck the manual!
It’s Read The Fucking Manual not Fuck The Reading Manual
Meanwhile I’m sitting here with my ADHD brain that is unable to read the first two sentences of a manual without losing focus and thinking about 15 other things and marveling at those can actually get through something like that and have it stick in their brain longer than 5 minutes.
Oh, reading a manual is a very involved process for me. First, I’ll put the task in my bullet journal, then I’ll postpone it to the next week, then to the month, then to the next month. And then, if I feel lucky, I’ll bring it back into my daily log, and postpone it a few more days before getting annoyed with writing it down so many times that it could fill a full page, and finally reading it.
The trick with my ADHD brain is to refer to documentation when I’m hyperfocused on how the thing works for some reason. It doesn’t have to be because it’s broken, but it could be, lol.
For me, it’s only when it’s broken.
To be fair, that is a great point in time to be RTFM.
My entire job is basically reading manuals 🙃
