You're viewing a single thread.
"Anyway, here are terminal commands you don't understand." and after asking for clarification on said terminal commands, you are quite rudely told to read The Manual - which seems to be some kind of a holy book for these bizarre creatures - without explaining in any way whatsoever which part of which manual you should be "reading". Thankfully, only every command ever created by anyone since the very conception of these systems - which was some 50 years ago in the seventies, in a university of a country you don't live in, written in a language you don't possibly even understand all that well, possibly by someone who also didn't know the language all that well - is discussed at length and in an impenetrably obtuse manner by many different parts of many different manuals, with helpful references to other commands and concepts you also don't understand, but which are all varying levels of essential knowledge for understanding some of these commands, while different levels for others. Also if you do not grasp the essential knowledge, you might completely fuck up your system. It seems that the philosophy in playing Dwarf Fortress is found in trying to use certain types of Linux distros, mostly frequented by massive nerds with hugely inflated egos: losing is fun! Because why else would I still be using Arch (btw)? But in any case: Read the Fucking Manual (rtfm to you as well, brother)
My ego isn't that big..
I chose Arch (in 2011) because
- Terminals make me look like hackerman
- I wanted to nerd out and learn the Linux ecosystem
- My engineer friends were Arch evangelists
I do catch myself saying "just read the manual", but not in a hostile way I think. When you're already in a terminal, once you get used to manuals, it's very accessible and it's quick to get what you need.
However, that usually requires you to know what you're looking for quite specifically, and that is something you can only learn through experience and study.
I'm very happy with my choice and the whole "you can easily fuck up your system" thing also works in reverse - you can just as easily fix your system. I've made a few mistakes over the years but nothing that I couldn't reverse. Just make sure you're not fiddling with partitions and boot loaders during work hours..
Preach. I don't regret the whole "diving into Arch" part, but I feel like I spent a lot of hours doing things that were pointless, nonsensical even. But then again I've spent most of these years since I started this journey struggling with and rehabilitating from various mental health problems (correlation=causation???) so I haven't had much anything better to do than pointless and nonsensical things, on and off the computer.
Just make sure you're not fiddling with partitions and boot loaders during work hours..
Ain't that the truth. Just recently I had invited my friend over for a coffee and such, and when he came I noticed my computer wouldn't want to boot because I had fiddled with something too critical. Sorted it out eventually, but I feel like it kinda crumbled the foundation of my whole "Linux is superior to Windows in every way" line of thinking I have been trying to bring to life among my friends...
I was around 18 when I started, so doing nonsensical things was my area of expertise at the time. That helps a bit with the feeling of time waste.
Still, it was not a complete waste, because now I can fix any such problems in minutes, and I always carry an archiso drive on me (which I used maybe once in the past 5 years to fix somebody else's PC which wasn't even running Arch).
I will say, without exaggerating, recovering from Windows boot issues has caused me WAY more issues over the years. It doesn't tell you what's actually wrong, you don't get much in terms of tools, and so it's much harder to fix unless you want to completely reinstall Windows (which apparently is a good idea to do regularly too..).
There is a manual pre-installed on your machine for most commands available. You just type man and the name of the thing you want the manual for. Many commands also have a --help option that will give you a list of basic options.
I should point out this isn't Linux specific either. Many of these commands come from Unix or from other systems entirely. macOS has a similar command line system actually. It's more that Linux users tend to use and recommend the command line more. Normally because it's the way of doing things that works across the largest number of distributions and setups, but also because lots of technical users prefer command line anyway. Hence why people complain about Windows command lines being annoying. I say command lines because they actually have two of them for some odd reason. Anyway I hope this helped explain why things are the way they are.
I've been using linux for ~17 years or so and I just realized the other day that there can be multiple "pages" in a manual
No, I don't want to talk about it
Indeed, well explained. Though I think I should mention that I've been using Linux in general for some 12-13 years, since from somewhere around Ubuntu 12.04 to 13.10. I did make the error of overestimating my own skills and abilities regarding "figuring it out" when I dove headfirst into Arch, so basically I was a self-proclaimed massive nerd, but I didn't even realize how inflated my own ego was. I don't think the archinstall script/library even existed back then, and I also had no clue about the man-pages, or how anything really worked.
So my comment here was more along the lines of embellished musings on my own past experiences trying to learn things while I was doing them. Through these experiences what I have learned though is that the Arch Wiki is an invaluable source for most Linux users.