Searching gives me the impression there’s a million ways to solve the same problem on Linux, and I find myself profiling answers into about four categories at a glance:

  • Succinct: one or two-liner, a single config file, or just a few clicks
  • Long-winded song-and-dance: Full train of thought interspersed between various commands and logs, several config files (some of which don’t already exist), or installing an obscure package that is no longer maintained
  • Specific to a desktop environment or version I don’t have
  • Just looks wrong

I’ll usually just take solutions from the first category, which almost always works, save for differences between updates and versions. Solutions in the second category also seem to end with a 50% chance of the OP unable to solve the problem. If I’m desperate, I’ll try the second one, but it often ends up not working, eventually leading me to come up with a much cleaner solution of my own.

Curious if anyone else does this too and if those one-liners are really better solutions or if it’s just confirmation bias.

  • Random Dent@lemmy.mlEnglish
    37·
    20 hours ago

    The usual tech support search:

    • First hit is a thread describing your exact problem, marked as [SOLVED]. Clicking it goes to a 404.

    • Second hit is a thread describing your exact problem that goes to an actual thread, but the message has been edited to just say “Solved” with no record of what was done.

    • Third hit is a thread describing almost your exact problem, with the first response calling the poster a noob for asking and then 15 pages of arguments.

    • Fourth hit is a thread describing something in the same general area as your problem, which you try anyway and makes the thing you’re trying to fix break in a different way, but it’s progress at least.

    • Actual solution is somewhere between the 5th and 8th hit, or you give up and come back to it in about a week and solve it instantly without trying for some fucking reason.

    So to answer the question, I can usually tell I’m getting close to the solution when I say “Oh for fuck’s sake” as I’m closing tabs lol.

    • seralth@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      7 hours ago

      I love to go with just rip out what ever is broken never look at it again and till eventually forgetting something was broken reinstalling what ever I ripped out only for everything to work again

      Despite trying to reinstall things like 3 times before.

      The key is you HAVE to forget about the problem or it knows your trying to trick it and it breaks it self again!

  • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
    18·
    22 hours ago

    The more experience you have, the more BS your able to smell. Sometimes I marvel at how succinct other people can be fixing an issue with amazing docs. Compared to my old “wizard spell” shenanigans that solve the issue, but only on a Tuesday, full moon, goats, etc…

    Its hard to solve issues, even harder to keep the solution working after a certain amount of time.

    • Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      8·
      12 hours ago

      Drives me nuts computer illiterate family members praising me for fixing the most basic, basic shit for them. They think its because I have lots of experience. But no, its because I learned the absolute basics of computer literacy and the experience I now have is grounded in that. I don’t want praise for “working magic”, I want people to fucking spend a small amount of their time learning the most BASIC of IT skills so I don’t have to waste my time fixing shit you should know.

      Sorry, my frustration might be showing just a little.

        • Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          3·
          12 hours ago

          My spouse is a tech and tells me he has all the patience for stupidity because he gets paid for it. Once upon a time, I was going to go into IT but turns out that no amount of money was worth it for me because my tolerance for stupidity and willful ignorance is next to zero.

          TBF, I still smile and tell family members it’s all good, no problem to fix and then vent my inward seething later on to my spouse 😅

  • slacktoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
    17·
    23 hours ago

    Treat the response like you would of an LLM, it needs to make sense to you, you need to make sure they aren’t messing with you or have given you a fix that only works in their case. Usually the best fixes are the simple ones. And it seems like even with the longer ones you’re able to figure out your simple fixes which is awesome!

    • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      10·
      22 hours ago

      Kind of funny how quickly we’ve flipped from “you should treat LLM output like advice from a random stranger” to “you should treat advice from a random stranger like LLM output”.

      Either way, it’s the right idea. If you can’t understand what you’re doing but you do it anyway, you’re going to create all kinds of problems for yourself.

      • slacktoid@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        21 hours ago

        Lolol yes, it’s a weird straight circle indeed.

        However applying those fixes and then learning to fix it is a great way to learn how to troubleshoot and unb0rk your system.

      • Mordikan@kbin.earth
        2·
        22 hours ago

        In a round about way, that does fix the problem you have, though. Just randomly changing things or installing/uninstalling packages until the whole OS is borked and you have to reinstall thereby clearing the problem.

        Doesn’t teach how to fix the problem, but at least they’ll get real proficient with setting up new system partitions.

  • MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de
    10·
    22 hours ago

    The difference between workable and non-workable usually boils down to whether I can understand each step and how they arrived at their solution(that is, can I fix my own fuck-up if I miss a step or impliment it wrong for my own situation), which I will know pretty quickly. That said, with my limitted knowlege, I can still spot the 50% that have no chance in hell of working pretty quickly.

    OTOH, if a solution is succinct, upvoted, and still looks wrong, I’m at least going to look into the problem further with that as a reference point before I write it off completely.

  • IHave69XiBucks@lemmygrad.ml
    10·
    24 hours ago

    I find i to look on forums for solutions less and less anyway. Once you’ve been using a distro long enough unless your trying to do something you’ve never done before it’s usually pretty simple to know what’s wrong, and fix it. Because you’ll get the same things popping up over and over again.

    I also like to keep like a little doc of fixes I’ve done on each computer so that if a year later i need to do a version upgrade or reinstall i can look back to it, and see what i did last time if i get repeat issues. Especially useful on stuff like laptops where you’ll have really specific hardware issues that reappear years later, and normally take hours and hours of trying to figure out what is broken.