8 ms·

> I spent several hours fixing a problem and I learned next to nothing in the process. This is probably true for this specific case here, but my experience wit

by nicoco 4y ago

> I spent several hours fixing a problem and I learned next to nothing in the process. This is probably true for this specific case here, but my experience with fixing stuff in Linux is actually the opposite. I learnt a lot doing so, and learnt stuff that turned out to be later useful in very unexpected spots. Back when I was a teen and using Windows, I've spent countless hours fiddling in stuff in regedit and other atrocities and it feels like I never learnt anything useful in the long run.

revolvingocelot 4y ago
Usually my go-to for "Linux problems" is "tear down the VM and start a new one", but a few days ago my Manjaro rig at home lost power, and bluetooth wouldn't work upon restart. I wracked my brain, pored through forum threads, man pages, and LFS, but nothing really helped. It looked like several different problems at once, but none of the individual fixes worked, or only worked for minutes at a time. I stepped away from the problem for a while, as one does, while I mused about the way troubleshooting works, and how my early life with Windows and now modern containerization has predisposed me to certain types of solu-- wait, I've got it! rmmod the bluetooth modules, modprobe 'em back in. Everything worked flawlessly. I'm not sure what I learned. *sigh*
- deltarholamda 4y ago
  >I'm not sure what I learned. "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"
  - ectopod 4y ago
    Exactly. My tendency is to jump in and try to root cause problems but nowadays the most productive solution is almost always some kind of a restart.
  - ragingrobot 4y ago
    I've done this enough, but don't stop there as it's likely to happen again. When I resort to such a solution, I take a look at the syslogs. More often than not, something there will tell me why a simple restart of a service, module, whatever was the answer. I had a similar problem as the article with a standard USB 3 enclosure. Two PCs, identical OS (oS Tumbleweed), same kernel version even. modprobe -r then modprobe usbstorage and it worked. An obscure error in the logs pointed to the uas module which for some reason failed to reload, enabling the enclosure to work. Oddly, the other PC on which it worked was loading uas.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - anonymousDan 4y ago
    I always refer to this as Computer Science 101.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
markus_zhang 4y ago
I think unless one uses Linux on daily basis it's really difficult to sink in the knowledge. I decided to install an Archlinux VM and see what happens. I'm kinda disappointed to myself as I found out I didn't like too much trouble so I'll probably never be a good/great programmer.
- miloignis 4y ago
  I wouldn't write it off just yet, at least if you want to be a good programmer! While there might be some correlation, there's plenty of fantastic programmers who don't want the hassle and want to focus on a specific problem and just use Windows/macOS and an easy to setup/low configuration editor. One particularly great TA I had in college comes to mind...
  - markus_zhang 4y ago
    Thanks, but I actually wanted to learn low level stuffs, or I thought I wanted. Anyway I'll see what happens. So far nothing really clicks for me but if that's it then that's it.
    - nequo 4y ago
      What types of low-level things did you want to learn? A lot of what seem low-level in Linux are implementation-specific things. For example, how you set up wifi or how you manage your firewall. Knowledge of these things gives you less long-lived and less transferable skills than knowledge of protocols like TCP/IP which is shared by everything that is plugged to the internet. It doesn't make you a better programmer, unless these daemons and tools are what you want to write software for. Also, your options are not only Arch Linux and Windows/Mac. There are more desktop-ready distributions, too, like Ubuntu or Fedora. Linux lets you still inspect the plumbing if you install one of those.
      - markus_zhang 4y ago
        > What types of low-level things did you want to learn? To be honest, I've dabbed in a lot of low level stuffs but never went deep enough to make any impact, career-wise at least. For example I completed a full course on MCU programming, completed the first half of nand2tetris, read the first few hundreds of pages of "Beginner Reverse Engineering" (basically the part that teaches one to recognize C from decompiled assembly code), and many others. My most recent low level adventure was the book "Practical Binary Analysis" which I planned to use the whole holiday to push maybe a few chapters. But I never drilled deep enough into any of the topics. I believe I have the brain to drill at least a few more chapters deeper for any of them, but I don't have the mental power to do it. I secretly want someone to put me into some sort of prison and keep me from getting out until I completed all previous projects and learnings. But of course I need to figure out a way to deal with the problem. Anyway, really appreciate your answer, and probably I'll still install Archlinux, play with it a few days and then lose interest -- just another failed project to spend time.
antihero 4y ago
Linux is like driving a car with your hands in the engine
- nicoco 4y ago
  Can I steal this? I just started a microblogging career and it's too good.
- JP_Watts 4y ago
  And thinking "why doesn't everybody want to do this?"
- swayvil 4y ago
  This contradicts my experience. I use Linux every day and I never touch the engine. I also set up Linux for computer-illiterate old ladies. They love it.
  - seanw444 4y ago
    Some people just don't like the Linux (or Unix) way of doing things. I personally can't understand the predisposition against it, but hey, whatever works for them I guess.
    - swayvil 4y ago
      For your average user it's exactly the same desktop as windows and mac : there's menus and icons, you click on stuff, there's a browser... What's this "way" that they don't like? They don't like free, stable and fast? They don't like how it isn't going after your wallet every 5 minutes? It's gotta be propaganda at work. It's the only explanation.
      - iraqmtpizza 4y ago
        Ubuntu desktop is anything but stable. Nuke-and-pave is the only sane solution to the OS corruption issues. The GUI is more stripped down than a holocaust victim. They still haven't figured out drag and drop. And on top of that, everyone swears such-and-such distribution is actually the good one, but it never is. The desktop is in permanent demo mode. A back-burner school project that turned into a part-time hobby. Maybe you just use it for web browsing. But for everyone else, there's Windows. Which is still crap but at least you can set an environment variable without doing a research project into the differences between .bash_profile, .bashrc, .profile, and /etc/environment. None of which have a GUI. And the best part is that none of them can ever be renamed because muh scripts would break and the entire OS would come crashing down.
nebulous1 4y ago
I think the issue is that frequently the problem is with a small part of a complex subsystem that you don't understand (or perhaps didn't even know existed) before something went wrong. This sort of problem is extremely time consuming to debug via "properly" learning about the system, so you end up (much like Fabien) taking a fix from somewhere without fully understanding it. There's also a timing issue. Often when something goes wrong it's at a random time when I'm probably intending to do something else. I don't want to put off that other thing even more by taking a "slower" route to fixing the issue. You can of course still learn a lot along the way, as you say. So, it's not all lost, but it does seem sub-optimal.
- fragmede 4y ago
  Part of it is the binary config nature of Regedit though. I can't, from first or second principles, reason about which binary key to flip in order to change the behavior I'm looking for. Was it HKLM/ffebdcaaf, or HKLM/afbedccfh? Meanwhile if, eg dns got broken on my Linux box, there's a series of config files and daemons to check in order to figure out what's broken and then to get it working again. There's no way to learn anything with Regedit other than knowing you can just Google for the name of the key to set by looking up the problem.
  - ddulaney 4y ago
    Eh, having worked with both systems, I'd say they're roughly equally impenetrable. For sure, the registry sucks. But at least it's uniform and scriptable. Once you know what needs to be changed, you can write a .reg file and be reasonably confident it will at least change the registry in a valid way. On the other hand, if the solution to a problem on Linux is to change some dotfile controlling some daemon, reliably scripting it can be difficult to impossible. Did the distro put the config file somewhere weird? Is awk good enough here? What if the key I'm looking to update is found in a comment, and what is the commenting structure for this file anyway? What if the daemon rewrites its config file on exit [0]? Or has a config file with an extremely complex format [1]? Or I need to poke several /sys files in a particular order [2]? Both systems are hard to reason about, especially if you don't know them. But Linux isn't easy to approach for the first time, and there are advantages to the way Windows does things. [0]: https://askubuntu.com/questions/251797/transmission-daemon-keeps-resetting https://askubuntu.com/questions/251797/transmission-daemon-k... [1]: https://www.sudo.ws/docs/man/1.8.15/sudoers.man/#SUDOERS_FILE_FORMAT https://www.sudo.ws/docs/man/1.8.15/sudoers.man/#SUDOERS_FIL... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM
dm319 4y ago
Yes, I remember, even up until very recently, having to google help on Windows. You'd get webpages full of adverts with a heading '12 ways to fix Win10 freezing during upgrade bug!'. And the first two would be something like 'switch it off and on again', 'try again', 'reconnect to your wifi'. I always felt I could dive deeper with linux problems _if I wanted to_, and that weirdly gives me some confidence that I can fix it.
- harywilke 4y ago
  And after you scroll past the obvious solutions, "Install our Fix-O-Matic software for $29.99!" because the page is actually an advertisement cloaked as a help page.
mattpallissard 4y ago
> but my experience with fixing stuff in Linux is actually the opposite. I learnt a lot doing so, and learnt stuff that turned out to be later useful in very unexpected spots. Same, in fact it's how I fell ass-backwards into my career path.
nektro 4y ago
and this article will now be much more higher in Google results for the next person searching :)

by nicoco 4y ago

revolvingocelot 4y ago

Usually my go-to for "Linux problems" is "tear down the VM and start a new one", but a few days ago my Manjaro rig at home lost power, and bluetooth wouldn't work upon restart. I wracked my brain, pored through forum threads, man pages, and LFS, but nothing really helped. It looked like several different problems at once, but none of the individual fixes worked, or only worked for minutes at a time. I stepped away from the problem for a while, as one does, while I mused about the way troubleshooting works, and how my early life with Windows and now modern containerization has predisposed me to certain types of solu-- wait, I've got it! rmmod the bluetooth modules, modprobe 'em back in. Everything worked flawlessly. I'm not sure what I learned. *sigh*

deltarholamda 4y ago
>I'm not sure what I learned. "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"
- ectopod 4y ago
  Exactly. My tendency is to jump in and try to root cause problems but nowadays the most productive solution is almost always some kind of a restart.
- ragingrobot 4y ago
  I've done this enough, but don't stop there as it's likely to happen again. When I resort to such a solution, I take a look at the syslogs. More often than not, something there will tell me why a simple restart of a service, module, whatever was the answer. I had a similar problem as the article with a standard USB 3 enclosure. Two PCs, identical OS (oS Tumbleweed), same kernel version even. modprobe -r then modprobe usbstorage and it worked. An obscure error in the logs pointed to the uas module which for some reason failed to reload, enabling the enclosure to work. Oddly, the other PC on which it worked was loading uas.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- anonymousDan 4y ago
  I always refer to this as Computer Science 101.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

markus_zhang 4y ago

I think unless one uses Linux on daily basis it's really difficult to sink in the knowledge. I decided to install an Archlinux VM and see what happens. I'm kinda disappointed to myself as I found out I didn't like too much trouble so I'll probably never be a good/great programmer.

miloignis 4y ago
I wouldn't write it off just yet, at least if you want to be a good programmer! While there might be some correlation, there's plenty of fantastic programmers who don't want the hassle and want to focus on a specific problem and just use Windows/macOS and an easy to setup/low configuration editor. One particularly great TA I had in college comes to mind...
- markus_zhang 4y ago
  Thanks, but I actually wanted to learn low level stuffs, or I thought I wanted. Anyway I'll see what happens. So far nothing really clicks for me but if that's it then that's it.
  - nequo 4y ago
    What types of low-level things did you want to learn? A lot of what seem low-level in Linux are implementation-specific things. For example, how you set up wifi or how you manage your firewall. Knowledge of these things gives you less long-lived and less transferable skills than knowledge of protocols like TCP/IP which is shared by everything that is plugged to the internet. It doesn't make you a better programmer, unless these daemons and tools are what you want to write software for. Also, your options are not only Arch Linux and Windows/Mac. There are more desktop-ready distributions, too, like Ubuntu or Fedora. Linux lets you still inspect the plumbing if you install one of those.
    - markus_zhang 4y ago
      > What types of low-level things did you want to learn? To be honest, I've dabbed in a lot of low level stuffs but never went deep enough to make any impact, career-wise at least. For example I completed a full course on MCU programming, completed the first half of nand2tetris, read the first few hundreds of pages of "Beginner Reverse Engineering" (basically the part that teaches one to recognize C from decompiled assembly code), and many others. My most recent low level adventure was the book "Practical Binary Analysis" which I planned to use the whole holiday to push maybe a few chapters. But I never drilled deep enough into any of the topics. I believe I have the brain to drill at least a few more chapters deeper for any of them, but I don't have the mental power to do it. I secretly want someone to put me into some sort of prison and keep me from getting out until I completed all previous projects and learnings. But of course I need to figure out a way to deal with the problem. Anyway, really appreciate your answer, and probably I'll still install Archlinux, play with it a few days and then lose interest -- just another failed project to spend time.

antihero 4y ago

Linux is like driving a car with your hands in the engine

nicoco 4y ago
Can I steal this? I just started a microblogging career and it's too good.
JP_Watts 4y ago
And thinking "why doesn't everybody want to do this?"
swayvil 4y ago
This contradicts my experience. I use Linux every day and I never touch the engine. I also set up Linux for computer-illiterate old ladies. They love it.
- seanw444 4y ago
  Some people just don't like the Linux (or Unix) way of doing things. I personally can't understand the predisposition against it, but hey, whatever works for them I guess.
  - swayvil 4y ago
    For your average user it's exactly the same desktop as windows and mac : there's menus and icons, you click on stuff, there's a browser... What's this "way" that they don't like? They don't like free, stable and fast? They don't like how it isn't going after your wallet every 5 minutes? It's gotta be propaganda at work. It's the only explanation.
    - iraqmtpizza 4y ago
      Ubuntu desktop is anything but stable. Nuke-and-pave is the only sane solution to the OS corruption issues. The GUI is more stripped down than a holocaust victim. They still haven't figured out drag and drop. And on top of that, everyone swears such-and-such distribution is actually the good one, but it never is. The desktop is in permanent demo mode. A back-burner school project that turned into a part-time hobby. Maybe you just use it for web browsing. But for everyone else, there's Windows. Which is still crap but at least you can set an environment variable without doing a research project into the differences between .bash_profile, .bashrc, .profile, and /etc/environment. None of which have a GUI. And the best part is that none of them can ever be renamed because muh scripts would break and the entire OS would come crashing down.

nebulous1 4y ago

I think the issue is that frequently the problem is with a small part of a complex subsystem that you don't understand (or perhaps didn't even know existed) before something went wrong. This sort of problem is extremely time consuming to debug via "properly" learning about the system, so you end up (much like Fabien) taking a fix from somewhere without fully understanding it. There's also a timing issue. Often when something goes wrong it's at a random time when I'm probably intending to do something else. I don't want to put off that other thing even more by taking a "slower" route to fixing the issue. You can of course still learn a lot along the way, as you say. So, it's not all lost, but it does seem sub-optimal.

fragmede 4y ago
Part of it is the binary config nature of Regedit though. I can't, from first or second principles, reason about which binary key to flip in order to change the behavior I'm looking for. Was it HKLM/ffebdcaaf, or HKLM/afbedccfh? Meanwhile if, eg dns got broken on my Linux box, there's a series of config files and daemons to check in order to figure out what's broken and then to get it working again. There's no way to learn anything with Regedit other than knowing you can just Google for the name of the key to set by looking up the problem.
- ddulaney 4y ago
  Eh, having worked with both systems, I'd say they're roughly equally impenetrable. For sure, the registry sucks. But at least it's uniform and scriptable. Once you know what needs to be changed, you can write a .reg file and be reasonably confident it will at least change the registry in a valid way. On the other hand, if the solution to a problem on Linux is to change some dotfile controlling some daemon, reliably scripting it can be difficult to impossible. Did the distro put the config file somewhere weird? Is awk good enough here? What if the key I'm looking to update is found in a comment, and what is the commenting structure for this file anyway? What if the daemon rewrites its config file on exit [0]? Or has a config file with an extremely complex format [1]? Or I need to poke several /sys files in a particular order [2]? Both systems are hard to reason about, especially if you don't know them. But Linux isn't easy to approach for the first time, and there are advantages to the way Windows does things. [0]: https://askubuntu.com/questions/251797/transmission-daemon-keeps-resetting https://askubuntu.com/questions/251797/transmission-daemon-k... [1]: https://www.sudo.ws/docs/man/1.8.15/sudoers.man/#SUDOERS_FILE_FORMAT https://www.sudo.ws/docs/man/1.8.15/sudoers.man/#SUDOERS_FIL... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-IWMbJXoLM

dm319 4y ago

Yes, I remember, even up until very recently, having to google help on Windows. You'd get webpages full of adverts with a heading '12 ways to fix Win10 freezing during upgrade bug!'. And the first two would be something like 'switch it off and on again', 'try again', 'reconnect to your wifi'. I always felt I could dive deeper with linux problems _if I wanted to_, and that weirdly gives me some confidence that I can fix it.

harywilke 4y ago
And after you scroll past the obvious solutions, "Install our Fix-O-Matic software for $29.99!" because the page is actually an advertisement cloaked as a help page.

mattpallissard 4y ago

> but my experience with fixing stuff in Linux is actually the opposite. I learnt a lot doing so, and learnt stuff that turned out to be later useful in very unexpected spots. Same, in fact it's how I fell ass-backwards into my career path.

nektro 4y ago

and this article will now be much more higher in Google results for the next person searching :)