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this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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I'm not jumbling anything together. The Linux community is full of toxic, elitist edgelords that expose various behaviours which are entirely uninviting to beginners. Those behaviours are also very annoying for people like me who want stuff answered without responses that sound belittling or like a challenge of ones skills.
Of course there are users who seem incapable of reading a manual and even pointing them to the passage with "you can find more information here, it should answer your question. If that doesn't, feel free to explain further and I'll gladly help you" nets a question about exactly what's written in the passage. My way of dealing users unwilling to read is not to respond, not RTFM.
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Can I hazard a guess?
Did you complain that linux needs to ditch the CLI to become more usable, to which people responded "actually I like the CLI and it's necessary to keep for these 14 reasons even if you never had to use it due to gui, and help will always be offered through the CLI commands because it's easier to offer a simple one liner that fixes the issue instead of walking you through 15 screenshots of some arcane GUI program they may never even have used?"
Gotta be honest, people can be dicks for sure, but usually when I see it, it's because instead of learning the operating system that exists they demand the entire FOSS community bend to their specific need instead of them learning anything. It's the digital version of moving to CA from Texas because of their shitty laws and then trying to make CA's laws match the ones you're used to, that you just left, because they sucked. Sometimes the answer is to learn the new thing instead of reshape it into the old, and that's ok! Frankly when I switched I saw it as an exciting learning opportunity (even if it was kinda frustrating sometimes, so was biology class and that was fun too!)
I may be wrong about it in this case, but I would def be interested in what was said preceding them being dicks to you (which I totally believe they were dicks, I'm just curious if it was completely unwarranted, or if it was in response to the usual unreasonable demand.)
That's a well-meaning assumption, but no. My personal experiences asking for help from the linux community are very spaced out, and I understood long ago that asking for a GUI for something in linux is akin to requesting the murder of Torvalds.
For sure there are lots of people who start using linux and demand it works for their very specific usecase, verbally assault project maintainers, expect they be treated like paying customers despite getting something for free, and just do not understand that many opensource projects are passion projects with no commercial goals. I won't even get into the FLOSS purists who lose their minds when somebody does want to make money with opensource and dares use a different license.
But what I see more often is somebody asking for instructions to do something and being told to RTFM, "just do X", or copy-paste some commands into their terminal. And when the person asks for something without terminal commands, the responses are less than friendly. What worse is when developers suggest building a GUI (or even presenting a GUI) to make things easier for newcomers and advanced users going "but there's a CLI for that" or "please don't" or some other response like that.
And of course this isn't limited to the OS. As a developer, the "just use vim/emacs" crowd are equally as annoying. Trying to get neovim configured was such a terrible experience I just dropped it. Not only because of neovim itself, but because of the community too. "just learn LUA", "just copy this into your config, it's not that hard", *copy-paste some link to a stack-overflow question that has nothing to do with the question I asked*, etc. . It's quite similar with the Rust community that would love to lynch anybody using
unsafein their code.It's that unhelpful and dogmatic attitude that I find is pervasive in tech communities. KDE developers and Gnome developers get along well, KDE and Gnome users could wage wars over which DE is the best. Zeus help you if you're a beginner and get in between.
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