5 ms·

As a linux user since the 90s, googling for basic issues on Windows is an unmitigated disaster. For linux I have always got a correct answer.

gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago
I don't know about that - with (especially desktop) Linux one has to be quite specific to get an up to date solution. There's been a lot of churn in the stack in last decade (i think the stack is much improved as a result).
- dnautics 10y ago
  yeah sometimes I have to check the date on the solution to make sure I really want to do that
- mod 10y ago
  Yes. Ubuntu, you'd better be including a version. Arch? You need to make sure you're not looking at something a decade old. I often just scope my google search. Also, I do not find that I can answer every question easily for linux, even though I've used it as my primary OS since ~2002 and have some idea what to google for. In fact, I have both sound and bluetooth issues on my machine right now that I have given up trying to resolve.
- endisukaj 10y ago
  I've been using Linux for the past 6 years (on and off only the first two of those) and I have never had this happen to me. Maybe when I was using Ubuntu it was harder to find good answers that were not specific to someone else's usecase because of the nature of Ubuntu forums.
  - sdenton4 10y ago
    Back in the day I chose Gentoo Linux entirely based on an evaluation of its forums. It didn't disappoint: In five or so years of heavy use, I only ran into one issue that wasn't explained in great detail in the forums. The ridiculously high bar to entry seemed to do wonders for discussion quality.
    - endisukaj 10y ago
      I agree. I had the same experience as you when I moved from Ubuntu to Arch, the forums and Wiki are of extremely high quality.
joatmon-snoo 10y ago
I was born in the '90s... but with Linux, the case for me is that given enough time, I can usually find all the information I need to figure it out. With Windows it's Google for 10 minutes then throw my hands in the air and figure out a workaround. I'm not sure which is better for my productivity: realizing that I accidentally screwed up my DNS resolver and spending the next hour hunting through forum posts and man pages before finding the snippet that explains what I was supposed to do and reconfiguring my resolved.conf symlink or figuring out the quickest, crudest workaround on Windows.
mirimir 10y ago
I was once told by Microsoft support that what I wanted to do was impossible, because the code was so old and chaotic that nobody understood how it worked ;)
arca_vorago 10y ago
As a sysadmin who has supported the gamut of OS's, the key to windows problem googling is the "-" operator. -microsoft.com -expertsexchange.com ... Stackoverflow really changed the game. I really should get active there again to give back more, I can't tell you how much a random stackover/superuser question helped me narrow down an issue. Also, has everyone forgotten about IRC?
Endy 10y ago
As a Windows user since the 90ss, when I tried using Linux for a week or two on a spare machine while my primary laptop was in the shop... Trying to find any information on Linux that didn't involve books' worth of text saying 'compile this', 'write this program in C', or 'do this incredibly arcane commandline operation' became an exercise in futility. Whenever I have a specific problem in Windows, I can Google it and either find a relevant YouTube video or something of value in the Microsoft knowledge base (separate from the "answers." Q&A board).
- krylon 10y ago
  > 'do this incredibly arcane commandline operation' I have seen my fair share of this in the Windows world, too. Edit registry keys you never even heard of, use that (mostly undocumented) command invocation (I'm look at you, SharePoint!), edit that XML file that sits in a place where it does not even make sense... On Linux (and other Unix systems), at least you have man pages, on Windows I cannot recall a single instance where the builtin help system has actually helped me. I mean, even MS-freaking-DOS had a reasonably useful builtin help. With Linux, at least it gets better once you get the hang of it. Microsoft's sorry excuse for documentation is (mostly) a joke. (The exception are developer tools - the documentation on T-SQL and the .Net framework classes is fairly good, even though it's such a mess that it's easier to Google for specific entries than using the TOC or the builtin search... once I find what I was looking for, I do usually find a helpful answer to my question.) (To be fair, when I first started using Linux, I found it incredibly strange, complicated, confusing and intimidating; within the first six months of using Linux, I was this close to literally throwing my PC out the window on no less than three occasions. So I know the frustration you speak of.)
  - youareterrible 10y ago
    Powershell has man too. It's an alias for get-help. Man get-command Get-help get-help
    - krylon 10y ago
      I know, and I like PowerShell's help system. But there are still plenty of commands available that are not PowerShell cmdlets. But I agree, PowerShell is a huge improvement.
TheRealDunkirk 10y ago
<cough>Bullshit</cough> If you were a Linux user in the mid-90's, then about the only place to get "help" was #linux on EFnet. Collectively, I don't think I've suffered more abuse on the internet than in that forum. And, yes, I'm still bitter. It was NOT a noob-friendly place. The best place -- ever -- to get Linux help was, and will always have been, the Gentoo forums, but that didn't take off till the early 2000's.
- mdekkers 10y ago
  The best place -- ever -- to get Linux help was, and will always have been, the Gentoo forums True! However, obligatory "Gentoo is rice" link: https://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/ https://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/
  - nthcolumn 10y ago
    Sven Vermeulen wrote great docs and the community was my first social media. Then that compiz-beryl thing happened and... where is she now I wonder?
- bubblethink 10y ago
  I wonder how much of Linux's recent success (I know it's still a tiny fraction) is just because of Google. I can't imagine using Linux if you take away the ability to Google. The fact that usually the results are posts by actual people and not some company stooge makes a world of difference.
  - djent 10y ago
    You get the same results on DuckDuckGo, etc. there's no search engine lock-in here.
    - tajen 10y ago
      Sorry, doesn't DDG use Google as a back-end, just anonymizing the results?
jodrellblank 10y ago
Most Linux forum answers online are "do this voodoo I copied from someone else and don't understand". It's a lot harder to pull a specific, coherent, considered answer out of the internet, which doesn't involve duct tape and breakable insecure awful things. "How do I run x on startup" will as likely get you "download this Ruby script which calls IFTTT.com triggered by when your network adapter connects, btw install this binary wifi driver blob" as "put this with a plain text password in /etc/whoknowsbutitworks lol" as "on your distro with your shell the startup system is XYZ and the startup scripts run like a then b then /home/user/c so put it in ~/c"

gjjrfcbugxbhf 10y ago

I don't know about that - with (especially desktop) Linux one has to be quite specific to get an up to date solution. There's been a lot of churn in the stack in last decade (i think the stack is much improved as a result).

dnautics 10y ago
yeah sometimes I have to check the date on the solution to make sure I really want to do that
mod 10y ago
Yes. Ubuntu, you'd better be including a version. Arch? You need to make sure you're not looking at something a decade old. I often just scope my google search. Also, I do not find that I can answer every question easily for linux, even though I've used it as my primary OS since ~2002 and have some idea what to google for. In fact, I have both sound and bluetooth issues on my machine right now that I have given up trying to resolve.
endisukaj 10y ago
I've been using Linux for the past 6 years (on and off only the first two of those) and I have never had this happen to me. Maybe when I was using Ubuntu it was harder to find good answers that were not specific to someone else's usecase because of the nature of Ubuntu forums.
- sdenton4 10y ago
  Back in the day I chose Gentoo Linux entirely based on an evaluation of its forums. It didn't disappoint: In five or so years of heavy use, I only ran into one issue that wasn't explained in great detail in the forums. The ridiculously high bar to entry seemed to do wonders for discussion quality.
  - endisukaj 10y ago
    I agree. I had the same experience as you when I moved from Ubuntu to Arch, the forums and Wiki are of extremely high quality.

joatmon-snoo 10y ago

I was born in the '90s... but with Linux, the case for me is that given enough time, I can usually find all the information I need to figure it out. With Windows it's Google for 10 minutes then throw my hands in the air and figure out a workaround. I'm not sure which is better for my productivity: realizing that I accidentally screwed up my DNS resolver and spending the next hour hunting through forum posts and man pages before finding the snippet that explains what I was supposed to do and reconfiguring my resolved.conf symlink or figuring out the quickest, crudest workaround on Windows.

mirimir 10y ago

I was once told by Microsoft support that what I wanted to do was impossible, because the code was so old and chaotic that nobody understood how it worked ;)

arca_vorago 10y ago

As a sysadmin who has supported the gamut of OS's, the key to windows problem googling is the "-" operator. -microsoft.com -expertsexchange.com ... Stackoverflow really changed the game. I really should get active there again to give back more, I can't tell you how much a random stackover/superuser question helped me narrow down an issue. Also, has everyone forgotten about IRC?

Endy 10y ago

As a Windows user since the 90ss, when I tried using Linux for a week or two on a spare machine while my primary laptop was in the shop... Trying to find any information on Linux that didn't involve books' worth of text saying 'compile this', 'write this program in C', or 'do this incredibly arcane commandline operation' became an exercise in futility. Whenever I have a specific problem in Windows, I can Google it and either find a relevant YouTube video or something of value in the Microsoft knowledge base (separate from the "answers." Q&A board).

krylon 10y ago
> 'do this incredibly arcane commandline operation' I have seen my fair share of this in the Windows world, too. Edit registry keys you never even heard of, use that (mostly undocumented) command invocation (I'm look at you, SharePoint!), edit that XML file that sits in a place where it does not even make sense... On Linux (and other Unix systems), at least you have man pages, on Windows I cannot recall a single instance where the builtin help system has actually helped me. I mean, even MS-freaking-DOS had a reasonably useful builtin help. With Linux, at least it gets better once you get the hang of it. Microsoft's sorry excuse for documentation is (mostly) a joke. (The exception are developer tools - the documentation on T-SQL and the .Net framework classes is fairly good, even though it's such a mess that it's easier to Google for specific entries than using the TOC or the builtin search... once I find what I was looking for, I do usually find a helpful answer to my question.) (To be fair, when I first started using Linux, I found it incredibly strange, complicated, confusing and intimidating; within the first six months of using Linux, I was this close to literally throwing my PC out the window on no less than three occasions. So I know the frustration you speak of.)
- youareterrible 10y ago
  Powershell has man too. It's an alias for get-help. Man get-command Get-help get-help
  - krylon 10y ago
    I know, and I like PowerShell's help system. But there are still plenty of commands available that are not PowerShell cmdlets. But I agree, PowerShell is a huge improvement.

TheRealDunkirk 10y ago

<cough>Bullshit</cough> If you were a Linux user in the mid-90's, then about the only place to get "help" was #linux on EFnet. Collectively, I don't think I've suffered more abuse on the internet than in that forum. And, yes, I'm still bitter. It was NOT a noob-friendly place. The best place -- ever -- to get Linux help was, and will always have been, the Gentoo forums, but that didn't take off till the early 2000's.

mdekkers 10y ago
The best place -- ever -- to get Linux help was, and will always have been, the Gentoo forums True! However, obligatory "Gentoo is rice" link: https://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/ https://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/
- nthcolumn 10y ago
  Sven Vermeulen wrote great docs and the community was my first social media. Then that compiz-beryl thing happened and... where is she now I wonder?
bubblethink 10y ago
I wonder how much of Linux's recent success (I know it's still a tiny fraction) is just because of Google. I can't imagine using Linux if you take away the ability to Google. The fact that usually the results are posts by actual people and not some company stooge makes a world of difference.
- djent 10y ago
  You get the same results on DuckDuckGo, etc. there's no search engine lock-in here.
  - tajen 10y ago
    Sorry, doesn't DDG use Google as a back-end, just anonymizing the results?

jodrellblank 10y ago

Most Linux forum answers online are "do this voodoo I copied from someone else and don't understand". It's a lot harder to pull a specific, coherent, considered answer out of the internet, which doesn't involve duct tape and breakable insecure awful things. "How do I run x on startup" will as likely get you "download this Ruby script which calls IFTTT.com triggered by when your network adapter connects, btw install this binary wifi driver blob" as "put this with a plain text password in /etc/whoknowsbutitworks lol" as "on your distro with your shell the startup system is XYZ and the startup scripts run like a then b then /home/user/c so put it in ~/c"