4 ms·

>So if anything goes wrong in my install, it’ll be a lot of forum-hopping and Discord searching to figure it all out This is not inaccurate, however every time

by seemaze 11mo ago

>So if anything goes wrong in my install, it’ll be a lot of forum-hopping and Discord searching to figure it all out This is not inaccurate, however every time I've had to interface with either Microsoft or Adobe issues, both the professional and community support have been abysmal. Both community forums seem to incentivize engagement to the point where every response is 3+ hyperlinks deep to someone else's vaguely related post. Maybe the linux forums self select for independent problem solvers..

huflungdung 11mo ago
[dead]
ronsor 11mo ago
Community forums/support from big companies like Microsoft and Adobe tend to be completely useless. In most cases, all threads follow the same flow: * Question with reasonable amount of detail. * A reply from some "Community Helper" (Rank: Gold): "did you try reading the help files?" * Another person with a "Staff" badge: "this isn't our department" [Thread closed.]
- ACCount37 11mo ago
  At least it's not Qualcomm support forums. "Talk to the sales about this functionality. [Thread closed]"
  - marcosdumay 11mo ago
    I have some respect for the Oracle's honesty in putting stuff like "this bug can't be solved in the cheapest version of the software, buy the upgrade package X if you need it fixed" right on the forum.
    - jm4 11mo ago
      There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. Every enterprise OSS company operates like that. People paying for support and funding the project get to make requests. Anyone else can submit a PR or be happy with the free software. It’s a pretty good deal if you ask me. Granted, Oracle charges a lot just to even use the software, but I still don’t think it’s unreasonable to limit certain types of requests for higher paying customers. Pay base price and you get to use the software, get updates and call tech support. Pay a premium and they prioritize bug fixes and features for you.
      - marcosdumay 11mo ago
        The "no guarantee of fitness for a purpose" people put on the terms of software they sell is bullshit. There is something wrong with selling software with some functionality and then requiring customers to buy other pieces of software to make that functionality work. That said, yes, they still handle that bit better than most large companies.
        hiAndrewQuinn 11mo ago
        You could ask the company to remove that clause for you, but it may come with two or three extra zeroes at the end of the price tag because of the legal and support ramifications that come with it. You could make such a clause illegal, but then all software would have to come with those two or three extra zeroes.
- xmprt 11mo ago
  Or * Helper: This is a great suggestion which I'll flag for the team to add support (5 years ago)
  - egypturnash 11mo ago
    For what it’s worth the people who made that sort of post are probably vaguely annoyed at the lack of progress on this change, or on other ones on their own particular list of requests that have been moldering for half a decade while everyone spends three dev cycles adding half-assed AI bullshit features.
- Jigsy 11mo ago
  Or "Did you try rebooting?"
  - esafak 11mo ago
    The Microsoft Way (tm)
- 2muchcoffeeman 11mo ago
  Many OpenSource forums and software are like this. None of the help is there to help you use the system. It’s there for you to gain some deep knowledge that you don’t care about. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. some Linux distro needs to adopt some hardware line and partner with them to release a known good line of computers and polish the hell out of it. Like System 76 but nicer.
  - ryandrake 11mo ago
    Almost all community help forums (for commercial and open source software) suffer from what I like to call "HaveYouTrieditis". You post a question, and without any root cause analysis or even a description of why it might work, people start posting "Have you tried X?" and "Have you tried Y?" and "You should try Z." These kinds of responses are almost always unhelpful. I'm asking for help because I don't want to just try random things.
- fHr 11mo ago
  Lmao true.
- robotnikman 11mo ago
  Hah, this gave me a good laugh. There have been countless times where I have ran into this exact kind of situation, and it's not just limited to Microsoft and Adobe.
  - seemaze 11mo ago
    This is true, I chose to pick on MS and Adobe because the article closes with the admission that the author has backup Windows machines to run Adobe Creative Cloud in the 'inevitable' event that Linux has a problem. For myself, those issues have been largely evitable; I think my longest current uptime on a running linux install is approaching 5 years..
- ElijahLynn 11mo ago
  Nailed it.
- jawilson2 11mo ago
  "Hello, thank you for posting. I understand you are having a problem with X. I assure you that you have my deepest sympathy in this time of trouble, and I will stop at nothing until this problem is fixed. Have you tried running sfc /scannow? ... Restart in Safe Mode? ... Backup and Reinstall Windows. You can use OneDrive to backup if you have not already purchased a subscription."
thewebguyd 11mo ago
> either Microsoft or Adobe issues Please run sfc /scannow closes topic Both MS and Adobe's forums are a complete joke, LLMs give better support than their respective "communities."
- gerdesj 11mo ago
  ... and reinstall Windows is offered as the next step after sfc /scannow.
  - KwanEsq 11mo ago
    This is grossly unfair. You've entirely omitted the `dism /cleanup-image /(scan|check|restore)-health` rain dance
    - gerdesj 11mo ago
      Blast. Soz. I've been using Windows since v1 or perhaps 2 - we had a "CAD" workstation at school back in the day. It was a RM Nimbus with a 80186 (yes!) in it. I own a Commodore 64 from 1984ish (still have it - it now has USB). I also recall using telnet to access the internet (gopher, WAIS etc) and being asked by my boss in 1994ish to investigate this www thing that was making waves. I found it after a lot of navigation through menu systems. This is a discussion about the real differences by Sir TBL: https://www.w3.org/History/1992/WWW/FAQ/WAISandGopher.html https://www.w3.org/History/1992/WWW/FAQ/WAISandGopher.html My report was: it looked pretty much the same as the rest, which shows exactly how prescient I was! To be honest, back then it was hard to tell what on earth was going on in a telnet session. At the time I could get at a sort of hyperlinked system on my telly (CEEFAX) and there were other similar systems around the world. In hindsight, I think graphics cemented the www's dominance. I remember discovering the Mosaic browser and leaving telnet at around the time when a MS President (yes the speccied one) decided the web was not going anywhere), and thinking "fuck: that's the future".
- seemaze 11mo ago
  My biggest hope for LLM's was to finally be able to make sense of all the Microsoft documentation; the constant churn in product naming, different versions with varying levels of support and compatibility, the multitude of different API's to accomplish the same operation.. turns out the LLM's are just a confused as me :(
soraminazuki 11mo ago
For sure. Despite its reputation, troubleshooting is much easier on Linux than on commercial OSes. It's not even close.
- CuriouslyC 11mo ago
  Beyond the sensibility of Unix compared to Windows, it turns out having the source code for everything and a fleet of AI agents makes it really straightforward to diagnose problems.
- HugoTea 11mo ago
  Even just knowing that most of the time if I launch an application from the terminal it'll probably tell me what it's doing. For Windows, I'm looking for log files uhh... maybe %appdata% somewhere... maybe C:\Windows\Temp... maybe debugview... maybe a crash dump which is umm... somewhere...
Affric 11mo ago
The worst online fora for support are for 'for profit' companies. I had one where I was trying to get mongosh (or similar, I think they have had multiple shells) to change some print behavior I had multiple users coming in and giving me incorrect answers to a different question that was easily found in the docs and then begging me to mark the question as solved with them as the respondent and they were always written as though I was some sort of child-king that needed to be kow-towed to. This kind of gamification of support fora incentivises responding rather than responding with correct answers. Conversely Linux fora always have people who are at best polite and largely know their shit. They will help you hunt down the problem until the point where you hit that it's actually a firmware bug and you gain skills along the way.
- seemaze 11mo ago
  The use of the Latin plural fora really resonates. It's like they are their own class of organism evolving in a digital terrarium.
BeetleB 11mo ago
I've set Kagi to blacklist sites like answers.microsoft.com for a reason.
SV_BubbleTime 11mo ago
> Both community forums seem to incentivize engagement to the point where every response is 3+ hyperlinks deep to someone else's vaguely related post. As a total sidenote, I do wonder when exactly stack exchange/overflow saw the writing on the wall with AI coding? I don’t need to look for Denver 069 2004 post about MQTT request response options where someone pointed him to a now 404 link, I just talked to Claude about it and we came up with a solution directly to my problem, using my code as an example.
thefz 11mo ago
> and Discord searching Yikes. This is the main issue of Discord, it's not publicly searchable.

by seemaze 11mo ago

huflungdung 11mo ago

[dead]

ronsor 11mo ago

Community forums/support from big companies like Microsoft and Adobe tend to be completely useless. In most cases, all threads follow the same flow: * Question with reasonable amount of detail. * A reply from some "Community Helper" (Rank: Gold): "did you try reading the help files?" * Another person with a "Staff" badge: "this isn't our department" [Thread closed.]

ACCount37 11mo ago
At least it's not Qualcomm support forums. "Talk to the sales about this functionality. [Thread closed]"
- marcosdumay 11mo ago
  I have some respect for the Oracle's honesty in putting stuff like "this bug can't be solved in the cheapest version of the software, buy the upgrade package X if you need it fixed" right on the forum.
  - jm4 11mo ago
    There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. Every enterprise OSS company operates like that. People paying for support and funding the project get to make requests. Anyone else can submit a PR or be happy with the free software. It’s a pretty good deal if you ask me. Granted, Oracle charges a lot just to even use the software, but I still don’t think it’s unreasonable to limit certain types of requests for higher paying customers. Pay base price and you get to use the software, get updates and call tech support. Pay a premium and they prioritize bug fixes and features for you.
    - marcosdumay 11mo ago
      The "no guarantee of fitness for a purpose" people put on the terms of software they sell is bullshit. There is something wrong with selling software with some functionality and then requiring customers to buy other pieces of software to make that functionality work. That said, yes, they still handle that bit better than most large companies.
      - hiAndrewQuinn 11mo ago
        You could ask the company to remove that clause for you, but it may come with two or three extra zeroes at the end of the price tag because of the legal and support ramifications that come with it. You could make such a clause illegal, but then all software would have to come with those two or three extra zeroes.
xmprt 11mo ago
Or * Helper: This is a great suggestion which I'll flag for the team to add support (5 years ago)
- egypturnash 11mo ago
  For what it’s worth the people who made that sort of post are probably vaguely annoyed at the lack of progress on this change, or on other ones on their own particular list of requests that have been moldering for half a decade while everyone spends three dev cycles adding half-assed AI bullshit features.
Jigsy 11mo ago
Or "Did you try rebooting?"
- esafak 11mo ago
  The Microsoft Way (tm)
2muchcoffeeman 11mo ago
Many OpenSource forums and software are like this. None of the help is there to help you use the system. It’s there for you to gain some deep knowledge that you don’t care about. But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. some Linux distro needs to adopt some hardware line and partner with them to release a known good line of computers and polish the hell out of it. Like System 76 but nicer.
- ryandrake 11mo ago
  Almost all community help forums (for commercial and open source software) suffer from what I like to call "HaveYouTrieditis". You post a question, and without any root cause analysis or even a description of why it might work, people start posting "Have you tried X?" and "Have you tried Y?" and "You should try Z." These kinds of responses are almost always unhelpful. I'm asking for help because I don't want to just try random things.
fHr 11mo ago
Lmao true.
robotnikman 11mo ago
Hah, this gave me a good laugh. There have been countless times where I have ran into this exact kind of situation, and it's not just limited to Microsoft and Adobe.
- seemaze 11mo ago
  This is true, I chose to pick on MS and Adobe because the article closes with the admission that the author has backup Windows machines to run Adobe Creative Cloud in the 'inevitable' event that Linux has a problem. For myself, those issues have been largely evitable; I think my longest current uptime on a running linux install is approaching 5 years..
ElijahLynn 11mo ago
Nailed it.
jawilson2 11mo ago
"Hello, thank you for posting. I understand you are having a problem with X. I assure you that you have my deepest sympathy in this time of trouble, and I will stop at nothing until this problem is fixed. Have you tried running sfc /scannow? ... Restart in Safe Mode? ... Backup and Reinstall Windows. You can use OneDrive to backup if you have not already purchased a subscription."

thewebguyd 11mo ago

> either Microsoft or Adobe issues Please run sfc /scannow closes topic Both MS and Adobe's forums are a complete joke, LLMs give better support than their respective "communities."

gerdesj 11mo ago
... and reinstall Windows is offered as the next step after sfc /scannow.
- KwanEsq 11mo ago
  This is grossly unfair. You've entirely omitted the `dism /cleanup-image /(scan|check|restore)-health` rain dance
  - gerdesj 11mo ago
    Blast. Soz. I've been using Windows since v1 or perhaps 2 - we had a "CAD" workstation at school back in the day. It was a RM Nimbus with a 80186 (yes!) in it. I own a Commodore 64 from 1984ish (still have it - it now has USB). I also recall using telnet to access the internet (gopher, WAIS etc) and being asked by my boss in 1994ish to investigate this www thing that was making waves. I found it after a lot of navigation through menu systems. This is a discussion about the real differences by Sir TBL: https://www.w3.org/History/1992/WWW/FAQ/WAISandGopher.html https://www.w3.org/History/1992/WWW/FAQ/WAISandGopher.html My report was: it looked pretty much the same as the rest, which shows exactly how prescient I was! To be honest, back then it was hard to tell what on earth was going on in a telnet session. At the time I could get at a sort of hyperlinked system on my telly (CEEFAX) and there were other similar systems around the world. In hindsight, I think graphics cemented the www's dominance. I remember discovering the Mosaic browser and leaving telnet at around the time when a MS President (yes the speccied one) decided the web was not going anywhere), and thinking "fuck: that's the future".
seemaze 11mo ago
My biggest hope for LLM's was to finally be able to make sense of all the Microsoft documentation; the constant churn in product naming, different versions with varying levels of support and compatibility, the multitude of different API's to accomplish the same operation.. turns out the LLM's are just a confused as me :(

soraminazuki 11mo ago

For sure. Despite its reputation, troubleshooting is much easier on Linux than on commercial OSes. It's not even close.

CuriouslyC 11mo ago
Beyond the sensibility of Unix compared to Windows, it turns out having the source code for everything and a fleet of AI agents makes it really straightforward to diagnose problems.
HugoTea 11mo ago
Even just knowing that most of the time if I launch an application from the terminal it'll probably tell me what it's doing. For Windows, I'm looking for log files uhh... maybe %appdata% somewhere... maybe C:\Windows\Temp... maybe debugview... maybe a crash dump which is umm... somewhere...

Affric 11mo ago

The worst online fora for support are for 'for profit' companies. I had one where I was trying to get mongosh (or similar, I think they have had multiple shells) to change some print behavior I had multiple users coming in and giving me incorrect answers to a different question that was easily found in the docs and then begging me to mark the question as solved with them as the respondent and they were always written as though I was some sort of child-king that needed to be kow-towed to. This kind of gamification of support fora incentivises responding rather than responding with correct answers. Conversely Linux fora always have people who are at best polite and largely know their shit. They will help you hunt down the problem until the point where you hit that it's actually a firmware bug and you gain skills along the way.

seemaze 11mo ago
The use of the Latin plural fora really resonates. It's like they are their own class of organism evolving in a digital terrarium.

BeetleB 11mo ago

I've set Kagi to blacklist sites like answers.microsoft.com for a reason.

SV_BubbleTime 11mo ago

> Both community forums seem to incentivize engagement to the point where every response is 3+ hyperlinks deep to someone else's vaguely related post. As a total sidenote, I do wonder when exactly stack exchange/overflow saw the writing on the wall with AI coding? I don’t need to look for Denver 069 2004 post about MQTT request response options where someone pointed him to a now 404 link, I just talked to Claude about it and we came up with a solution directly to my problem, using my code as an example.

thefz 11mo ago

> and Discord searching Yikes. This is the main issue of Discord, it's not publicly searchable.