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Clarification: Just making fun of people(including myself) who watch shitty videos instead of official documentation.
I really like the man pages, but they're an encyclopedia, not a tutorial. Great for looking up specifics when you already have a foundation. Not so great when starting out
When I was first learning programming I had a teacher who insisted that the only resource we could was the Java docs.
When you want to know what parameters you need to pass or what certain flags do, it's a great resource. When you don't even know how to iterate through an array, it's not the first place to look.
My dryer broke the other day, which turned out to be the heating element. I watched a bunch of videos to try and figure out how to troubleshoot the problem and hopefully address it.
One of the videos, after an intro, claimed to have the solution. Then they proceeded to talk about the temperature control features of the machine and how I should make sure the heat is turned on.
That is the level many of the unix / software development videos out there. Just literally some AI slop or silly person who doesn't know what they are talking about uploading a quick clip to grow their channel.
Honestly I kinda like man pages. It is a pain but it is the least painful. And compared to e.g. the PowerShell docs, I love the man pages.
Man pages fucking suck, and I say that having been working with linux full time professionally for 11 years.
The best ones have plenty of examples.
How about using tealdeer?
Is there any reason to use tealdeer over just tldr aside from speed?
I don't know tbh. I used both and tldr was really slow when compared to man or even just DDGing, tealdeer is real fast
Man pages are for reference, not learning.
Man pages are useful references but go ahead and learn how to use sed or awk from their man pages.
Yep.
That's what the RTFM folks don't seem to understand: if you didn't even know, what you're looking for, you can't look it up.
This in general is the main reason for the ai surge. Just dump the 2 sentence explanation into a prompt and hope something sensible comes from it rather than googling for half an hour.
No, make it like this:
I have a problem with program x. Please tell me how i do y if I want z. Use this man page for reference:
[insert man page into promt py copy paste]
This gives way better results.
Most of the time you don't have to insert the man page, it's already baked into the neural network model and filling the context window sometimes gives worse results.
I noticed that mentioning commands you want gives good results e.g.:
Hi,
I want to replace line with HOSTTOOLS += " svn"
in all layer.conf files under current directory
by usingfindandsedcommands.
If it's more complicated, pasting parial scrript for LLM to finish gave better results (4 me),
than pure prompt text.
Having a good --help command does wonders.
There are man pages which do avoid me opening a web browser, the systemd ones are pretty good for example.
I just installed tldr to test it out tho.
Man pages suck ass. But not as much as fucking YouTube tutorials.
Can someone just write a nice plain English instruction page?
You ask someone for instructions
They send you some bullshit 10 minutes long video
Now instead of ctrl+f or skimming the article and jumping where you want to go you need to jump around in a video
REEEE
I have a theory a lot of people are functionally illiterate and thus prefer videos as they can't skim well
Or maybe they just grok things more effectively via verbal instruction and visual aids?
Isn't that the same thing?
Man pages are for people who already know a lot about Linux and understand all the nuances and understanding of Linux
Even after using Linux for many many years I still don't understand wtf nearly all man pages mean. It's like a fucking codex. It needs to be simplified but not to the extreme where it doesn't give you information you need to understand it.
Tbh that's most of Linux, not designed for average people, designed by Linux users who think that all others should know everything about Linux.
To be fair we do the same with windows.
I'm in this image and I don't like it.
You're not a real linux user unless you've read the source because the documentation was inadequate.
Some mans are unreadable. I've been curling cheat.sh/[command] and its been great for example commands. Highly recommend.
I also like tldr for new commands. Sometimes I discover new ways by using it on the commands I know...
"How do I do X in linux?"
"Yeah so basically you just need to run this command and it should work on Ubuntu 12.10 (Last edited: Nov 2012)"
"Hey guys the way to do X changed in Ubuntu 16.04, see this updated link (Posted: Jan 2017)"
"Actually Ubuntu 18.04 is now using Y so you have to follow this new guide (Last edited: Jul 2019)"
"~~Crossed-out outdated guide~~
For Ubuntu 22, please reference this Canonical guide here. All other distros can simply use Z (Last edited: Aug, 2022)"
"404 not found (Canonical)"
"How do I do X in Debian?"
"You can run Z to do X (Posted: Oct 2013)"
"Thanks for this, it worked! (Posted: Sep 2023)"
"How do I do X in Fedora?"
"Ah just follow this wiki (Posted: Feb 2014)"
"(Wiki last update: Mar 2023)"
"How do I do X In Arch?"
"RTFM lmao: link to arch wiki (Posted: May 2017)"
"(Wiki last update: 3 minutes ago)"
After many years of tiptoeing through the distros, from RedHat 5 and Mandrake6 to Slack to Gentoo and now Fedora 41. The last thing I want anymore is to need to go RTFM.
I don't want to open a terminal to compile anything, (I got stacks of tee shirts), or goggle, (yes goggle), to make things work. I'm too old for this crap and I don't have that much longer to live wasting my short time remaining staring at a terminal and reading man pages. Distros and Linux by extension should "just work" in 2025. And thankfully they do-- most of the time.
You want to be a Sysadmin and a cmd line commando, have at it. I'm peacing out.
Now if only GUIs could be called and worked telepathically. Or better yet, fix any problems before they happen without me even knowing about it.
Man pages are literally indecipherable as a newby
I just wish they'd put some damn usage examples in there. I usually just need to do one thing I don't need a dissertation about it.
As a CS bachelor, I feel like programmers are not so good at giving examples. They are used to refactoring to cover more general cases. It's a part that makes me struggle at mathematics the most, because good examples are like half of math.
Copypastes every terminal command string from every forum post they see, hoping one of them fixes the problem