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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.
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.
Yeah, I'm writing code on Linux and for Linux and I use it extensively since 2012. I can remember maybe one or two times man was really helpful. Usually it's an enormous book that somehow doesn't contain exactly that bit information that you're looking for
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.
At least for programming/Linux stuff, it often enough actually does deliver keywords, that you can use as jumping off points. The proposed solutions however....
Or make
(gnu) make at least used to have pretty good info pages
That's true. I've been there many times.
Man pages are for reference, not learning.
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.
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...
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.
That's one of the reasons why I prefer to run older, enterprise hardware.
There's a good chance, everything has been configured before and most distros work just fine without any tweaking.
I want a stable platform to work on, not another hobby.
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.
To be fair we do the same with windows.
Has anyone here ever come across a low res tutorial video with microsmic font that is impossible to read? I appreciate their desire to help others but why do people do that?
Man pages suck ass. But not as much as fucking YouTube tutorials.
Can someone just write a nice plain English instruction page?
I'm in this image and I don't like it.