I’ve got to confess, I have for years been guilty if not reading the documentation. I simply go with the flow and hope it works…
But not anymore! And why the change you may ask? We’ll, I’m reading the f…ing documentation on Rocky linux and I’m just blown away from the amount of great information!
If you’ve been guilty of not reading the documentation, let me me know what changed it for you
If you’re not reading the documentation, this is your time to confess!
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If documentation is written in a readable and confluent way, RTFM isn’t such a big deal. The issue comes with overly draconian and non-confluent documentation.
Looking at you, Nix documentation
In my experience, all the Linux documentation I have read has been written for peers of Linux developers, who are familiar with technical terminology and several concepts and steps are left out and implied rather than explained.
It’s a way for developers to ensure that Linux never receives adoption past other developers. Literary equivalent of pulling the ladder up.
who are familiar with technical terminology and several concepts and steps are left out and implied rather than explained.
Said it before and I’ll say it again: had to manually install some software to make Steam tinker launch work, and the instructions for installing it were to download and prepare the GitHub folder, then “do the usual and move the completed file to …”
Ive used git in the past and it still took me multiple minutes to figure out they meant the “make && build” command. Why was that so hard to fucking write??
Highly specialized people live in bubbles and assume that everyone else lives in their same bubble and so if someone else doesn’t understand, they aren’t worth communicating with.
XKCD 2501, basically.
I thought you wrote confluence and wanted to grab my pitchfork.
rivers
Petrichor
Confluent?
Flowing/coming together.
I think what they are referring to are docs where pieces are explained individually, but not in a consistent or cohesive way, obfuscating use.
It’s weird that Linux certification requires rote-memorization of commands. The only people who make any effort to memorize commands are newbies and people studding for exams. You will always have access to bash history, man, and --help, even from an offline machine.
Every command I’ve memorized is simply the natural process of repetition. Is that your experience?
Yes. But also, despite having done it literally thousands of times, I still can’t tell you which way round to put the target and the link name for a softlink on the first go.
My first guess is always
ln -s $NAME $TARGETNo amount of repetition will fix this.
My trick to remember:
You can link to a target without giving a name to the link. ln will use the basename of the target file then. You can’t create a link without a target, so target has to go first since it’s not optional. Did it for me
I used to have that problem with ln until I realized it’s essentially the same ordering as cp: source, then destination. The source being the existing file that you’re linking to, and the destination being the link that you’re creating
I volunteer as developer for a decade old open source project. A sizable amount of my contribution is just cooking up decent documentation or re-writting old doc from the original module authors written close to a decade ago because it failed me information wise when I needed it. Programmers as it turns out are very ‘eh, the code should explain itself to anyone with enough brains to look at it’ type of people so lost in the sauce of being hyperfluent tech nerds instantly understanding all variables, functions, parameters, and syntax at very first glance at source code, that they forgot the need for re-translation into regular human speak for people of varying intelligence/skill levels who can barely navigate the command line.
Programmers as it turns out are very ‘eh, the code should explain itself to anyone with enough brains to look at it’ type of people
I cannot say how much I hate this.
even worse for old code where proper variable naming and underscores were forbidden. Impossible to get into someone else’s head.
Nothing teaches you what the documentation says like plowing ahead without reading it, fucking something up badly, having to crawl back to the documentation hat in hand and actually read it.
“F* you, I won’t read what you tell me!”
- Rage Against The Manual
so rally round your PC… with a pocket KVM
I worked next to a technical writer for Unix; the Unix. One of the things we were known for, actually, was the amazing documentation. This guy and both teams of writers (that many) maintained the doc as their entire job. It was written well, it was spell-checked, it was accurate, it was accessible. If you installed the machine, it was on http://localhost/doc or so.
Almost all tech writers were turfed after Y2K. They cost money and didn’t earn directly.
If you notice a lack of good docco like you notice a lack of mentoring in code dev (I see you, Systemd), then we know how we got to this stage.
If you become CEO, just keep that in mind.
I had a boring manufacturing job with long gaps between batches of work, so I read every help file in Windows NT4.1. While reading it, I found a way around our IT limitations on which apps we could run, and learned how to write scripts. So I wrote a password protected launcher tool using a macro feature in a terminal emulator I had access to on my workstation, and then started reading the man pages in Unix sys-V.
Man pages tend to assume a lot and overload the user with information.
Forums are full of “duh, haven’t you read the man pages, idiot?” kinds of people.
Web searches are full of AI/garbage (same thing) articles that focus on distros/programs that are either horrendously inaccurate, out of date, or simply don’t exist anymore.
Therefore, I utilize the
tldrman pages, and use extremely specific terms for web searches.I do read the docs. Even before trying software, to judge if ot will fulfill my requirements… Rocky Linux is one such example. Great docs, I’d love to try their distro one day :)
RTFM. …
… The last thing you try.What the … LOL
