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In part, all of this right here is why there's still a collection of people who don't consider Linux a viable alternative. It's giving a mix of "You're holding

In part, all of this right here is why there's still a collection of people who don't consider Linux a viable alternative. It's giving a mix of "You're holding it wrong" and Stack Overflow's "Question Marked as Duplicate"

the__alchemist 2y ago
That's an exquisite analogy.
zahlman 2y ago
>and Stack Overflow's "Question Marked as Duplicate" Based on my experience on Meta, and various random Reddit threads where people complain: in like 90% of cases where someone complains that a Stack Overflow question was unjustly marked as a duplicate, I could go take a look and then write out a clear step by step explanation of not only how it is very obviously a duplicate by Stack Overflow's standards, but exactly how to apply the advice from answers on the target to the original problem. Even if I didn't previously know anything about the technologies involved. Please keep in mind that it is not the purpose of Stack Overflow to solve the problem you are currently encountering. The purpose of Stack Overflow is to answer a question that can be useful to others. If your program doesn't work, it is explicitly, by policy, your responsibility to debug first; the point of creating a Minimal Reproducible Example is to demonstrate that you have found the problem and have a legitimate question about why it is a problem. Someone who closes your question as a duplicate is doing you a kindness. You immediately get answers and don't have to wait for someone else to write one. Closing duplicates is also doing everyone else a kindness, by helping to make sure that, when people use a search engine to find an answer on Stack Overflow, they all end up at the right place with the best-stated version of the question and the best answers for it. In many cases, the person who identifies a duplicate has gone out of the way to figure out the problem (despite an unclear explanation or an attempt to sneak in side questions about unrelated matters).

the__alchemist 2y ago

That's an exquisite analogy.

zahlman 2y ago

>and Stack Overflow's "Question Marked as Duplicate" Based on my experience on Meta, and various random Reddit threads where people complain: in like 90% of cases where someone complains that a Stack Overflow question was unjustly marked as a duplicate, I could go take a look and then write out a clear step by step explanation of not only how it is very obviously a duplicate by Stack Overflow's standards, but exactly how to apply the advice from answers on the target to the original problem. Even if I didn't previously know anything about the technologies involved. Please keep in mind that it is not the purpose of Stack Overflow to solve the problem you are currently encountering. The purpose of Stack Overflow is to answer a question that can be useful to others. If your program doesn't work, it is explicitly, by policy, your responsibility to debug first; the point of creating a Minimal Reproducible Example is to demonstrate that you have found the problem and have a legitimate question about why it is a problem. Someone who closes your question as a duplicate is doing you a kindness. You immediately get answers and don't have to wait for someone else to write one. Closing duplicates is also doing everyone else a kindness, by helping to make sure that, when people use a search engine to find an answer on Stack Overflow, they all end up at the right place with the best-stated version of the question and the best answers for it. In many cases, the person who identifies a duplicate has gone out of the way to figure out the problem (despite an unclear explanation or an attempt to sneak in side questions about unrelated matters).