linuxmemes

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.

A manual killed my parents.

I'll read the manual after it stops working. There are 10 pages of "warning: don't microwave your cat" and 10 pages of what obvious buttons do and if I'm lucky 3 pages of fault codes that in the worst case scenario I'll see one of them the next 10 years.

Sometimes customers pay me to troubleshoot what other vendors sold them, I find the manual for their model number and basically flick through it until I find something.

Lol. That's exactly what I did in the early 90s. ls /usr/bin, then man at, or whatever it was that came first, and work onwards from there.
Moreso when I installed my own Unix machine (briefly Minix, quickly replaced by Linux) and had to actually learn how to manage it.

But then I came from a mix of 8 bit, PC and semi big iron (Tandem) culture where any machine you used would matter of factly come with a litteral wall of binders containing documentation for pretty much anything (which led to the fun regular "documentation day" where you had to manually "patch" the documentation by replacing pages in all the binders with updated ones).
Anyway knowing what the fuck you were doing was pretty much expected. So everyone spent a lot of time perusing documentation.

Of course nowadays, to read documentation, you first have to find it, which can be quite a challenge in itself. But at least the manpages are still there.

Y'all not just out there vibe OSing?

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

Yeah, this sure resonates with me. When I started with Linux to set up anything you had to RTFM. I remember constantly reading some "Linux printing How-To" or "Linux Wi-Fi How-To". It definitely stayed with me. If I buy something and it has a manual I'm reading it. Just in case.

I think a lot of documentation just fly over my head. I have a masters degree in mathematics, but so many manuals have such deeply ingrained "tribal" language that everyone takes for granted that you know.

If you have a good starting point for a poor linux noob to read manuals, hit me up.

(That being said, I DO read the manuals for appliances and all that. THAT stuff is luckily easy)

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.

I've been using Linux for about a year now, I have no clue what is even in /usr/bin ....you people have manuals?! I needed a manual to find the thing.

I just learned about "man thing" in terminal a couple days ago. I had no idea they're kept in that folder.

linuxlunatics is almost a genre of its own

Half of US adults can't read at a 6th grade level. This is haunting.

Some strikingly high percentage can't complete complicated tasks on a computer (eg: find 3 user email addresses and add them to a spreadsheet).

Reading the manual is good advice but I think some people are just left behind