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For appliances at least, 95% of “the manual” today is useless CYA safety disclosures in 17 different languages. Manuals today rarely contain useful information.
Until you do like step one of taking an appliance apart, and realize that the real manual is marked “for technician use only”, and it’s hidden inside of the appliance.
My washer and dryer both have good manuals complete with circuit diagrams under the top once i take a few screws out. My chest freezer has one taped up under the hatch where the compresser sits. My refrigerator has one hidden in the door hinge.
Yeah, my parents were about to throw out an oven that would keep shutting off. I pull it away from the wall and boom, wiring diagram. Take out the ohm meter, figure out that the resistance across the temperature probe went to near zero when steam intruded through a gap in the crimp. 5 dollar part and it was good to go for years to come (the new part was crimped in a simpler, more robust way).
That or Google “<model> service manual”
Dishwasher had the service manual taped to the kick plate. It gave me codes to troubleshoot, finding the heating element died.
Ah, yeah, forgot that was another one I’ve done. It seems like I’ve taken apart most of my household appliances at this point.
Yup, just got done wiring up an old washer to turn it into a feather plucker using the technician only manual!
You mean actual paper manuals ester-egged inside the appliances themselves? In 2025?
The actual manual is usually hidden somewhere on it for repair techs to find. For my oven it was taped on the back.
Yep. I needed the circuit diagram for my microwave to fix an issue with the light (kept blowing out bulbs rapidly). Turned out you have to pull it out of the top inner frame, after unscrewing the button board and top panel. Thankfully, was an easy soldering fix, thyristor blew.
Generally microwaves are amongst the devices I tag as “do not self repair” I lack the confidence in my repair skills to fuck with the machine with giant caps and built in death ray.
If it was a problem with the microwave function I don’t think I’d have bothered. I’m terrible at repairing things and break most things worse than they were before. But it was the lightbulb acting up (the underside one, we’ve got an over-range mounted unit).
In this case I had the circuit diagram and multiple YouTube videos to lean on. Thankfully the thyristor is big, because I’m terrible at soldering, but it worked out.
Appliance repair in the 20’s? WTFY (Watch the fucking Youtube)
query:samsung Ice maker stoped working
Hi, I’m jimmy from shadyApplianceParts.com Did your samsung ice box stop making ice? That’s a common problem. What you need to…
Honestly I have to disagree. All my recently purchased appliances: microwave, washing machine, dishwasher and induction cooktop, had detailed instruction manuals that were genuinely useful, especially where the finer details aren’t obvious from the device itself.
Heck, even my wireless earbuds had a little bit of useful info, like how to force them into pairing mode.
Of course, all those manuals contained those nonsense safety warnings too (and I read every word of course! :P) but that’s neither here nor there.
All those safety warnings are useless nonsense, until:
This vacuum is not water resistant and no part of it shall come into contact with water. Do not operate this vacuum on wet floors.
Wash the infuser with water or coffee machine cleaning powder only. Do not wash with soap. Every 6 months, relubricate the seals with food and water safe silicone grease certified with NSF/ANSI/CAN 61 and NSF/ANSI 51.
Well, good to know.
The troubleshooting section of the manual is almost always useless because it only ever covers user error.
My washer threw a drainage error and the manual suggested I blocked the outlet or had done something daft. I looked up the error code online and 90% of the time it was a failed water pump.
I had to replace the water pump. It was an easy job that required less documentation than a lego set for a 5 year old. You just had to know which screws to loosen to get to the pump. Was it documented? Of course not.
There’s sometimes a few Ikea style pictures showing how to put it on a table and plug it in. Which is possibly useful to some.
And software doesn’t even come with those kinds of manuals anymore.
Some does if you’re lucky.
RTFM is an obnoxious retort for people, arguably in community, not to engage with a member of the community. I don’t mind reading the manual, but perhaps you can point me to where in the manual I could get further insight.
Reading a manual is also a skill. Being able to compartmentalize manual info into buckets of “obvious and I don’t need to read on”, “could be helpful”, “interesting, but it gets there I ain’t touching it” takes either training or just getting lucky after a certain number of reps.
Writing a manual is also a skill so starting with good ones help a lot.
Your second point is pretty much the most important skill learned in a humanities PhD, how to make your own learning path and learn what you need to know and what you should avoid.
RTFM is an obnoxious retort for people, arguably in community, not to engage with a member of the community.
I think there’s a low level of “How do I figure this out?” [generic] in which its good advice to ask “Does it say anything about this in the manual?” before you try and tear into a system as a third party giving advice.
I also think “I read the manual on my refrigerator” is some “I dare you to prove me wrong” horseshit. On the one hand, people don’t do this for a reason. Refrigerators simply aren’t that complicated to use. And the manual is rarely a smooth read, even for professionals. So its good advice, but not practical advice, better than half the time.
Reading a manual is also a skill. Being able to compartmentalize manual info into buckets of “obvious and I don’t need to read on”, “could be helpful”, “interesting, but it gets there I ain’t touching it” takes either training or just getting lucky after a certain number of reps.
Also, just a matter of free time and mental calories to burn. And hey, maybe if you’re a hobbyist who is hip deep in your Linux kernel because you eat this shit up, its the place you should have started. But also, Jesus Christ, maybe I just want a Mint instance to run a Jellyfin server. I’m not trying to get my master’s degree in this shit.
- It’s not impossible to learn if you read the manual. That’s how I learned.
- If you need my help cos you can’t figure it out, pay me. I don’t work for free.
- If you’re not paying me, I don’t owe you anything.
If you need my help cos you can’t figure it out, pay me
It’s so funny to see this on a sub dedicated to FOSS. Trying to imagine how many Pull Requests come with a bill attached.
There’s a difference between helping out people who are interested in, and capable of learning, improving, contributing to something…
… and people who just want thing work, and are also almost always unwilling to put literally any thought into this process.
‘User Support’ and ‘Collaborative Development’ are not the same thing.
There’s also ‘the computer guy’ syndrome, where a group of people just expect a seemingly infinite amount of uncompensated time and mental effort from ‘the computer guy’ to solve all their problems, who then take this for granted, and become hostile and offended when you tell them ‘sorry, don’t have the time’, when ‘the computer guy’ has the audacity to… want to do something else at that moment.
So much this
FOSS doesn’t mean “we think people that make software should work for free because we like free shit”. It means:
-
When you want to modify something someone else made to your benefit you should recognize the work they did for you and pay it back in the form of contributing those changes back to the project. Beyond that, it also benefits you directly because someone else might build on your improvements (well, that, but also its easier to stop your changes from breaking in new versions of the software if other people are aware of them). Like the other commenter said, its communal development, sure lots of people do it at least partly because they want to make the world a better place, but the primary reason it works is because the various parties mutually benefit from mutual cooperation.
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The belief that you should have complete control over your own computer, which you can’t do in practice without being able to view the source code of the software you run.
FOSS doesn’t mean “we think people that make software should work for free because we like free shit”.
What ingrained, unexamined immersion in capitalism does to a mofo.
-
This is the only comment I’ve seen in here that I’ve seen address this. The whole concept of RTFM is reactionary and ridiculous. That kind of thinking and behavior kept me at arm’s length from the Linux/tech community for many years. Still kinda does.
Fortunately this kind of thinking slowly but surely gets defeated, although we still have to fight for every inch of user-friendliness (and even modern security concepts) against elitists.
Unfortunately right now most documentation is still crap for average users, and people who keep repeating bullshit like “it’s better to provide CLI commands because they’re universal” (actual nonsense people keep saying) don’t make it better. The situation is so phenomenally bad that I’d outright assume Mistral AI with “Reflection” on to be more useful to newcomers when looking for solutions (on case a friendly professional or enthusiast isn’t available), because that thing is less likely to provide an outdated command for the wrong distro than a google search. Which is an absolutely abysmal place to be in for Linux as a whole if we want to keep the rising adoption train going.
I’m glad to hear it’s changing for the better but I lost my patience with these techie dumbfucks a long time ago. If people respond with anger or impatience at technical questions, I tell them they deserve to be publicly executed.
I mean in general, “read things -> learn” is a good approach to life imo.
Too long and difficult. I’ll let chat gpt tell me instead and read that between adverts on Love Island
Grok, is this true?
I’ll be honest, I’m guilty of using Chat GPT at times for stuff I know barely anything about and know I probably won’t be able to find through research as quickly as I’d like to. I always try the old-fashioned way of using a search engine first, go through reddit and forums and stuff, but sometimes I just need to use AI for a good first pointer
It’s not a terrible idea. ChatGPT is great at summarizing info, especially stuff you’d use manuals for. I make sure to ask it where certain info came from (so I can try to verify) OR having it explain its approach so I get it in the future.
we’re cooked
The idea that manuals in linux are a good way to learn and understand new software is peak linux neckbeard bs, and I will die on this hill. I congratulate OP on the exact type of autism that lets them feel this is an effective and useful method for learning new software, but if there is desire to have a greater adoption of linux maybe its bad to be snarky at folks for not instantly understand the terminal based documentation conventions of some dudes in the 70s. Maybe an alphabetical* list of all possible options is okay for referencing or searching, but is objectively insane way to learn or understand a problem.
They’re searchable and there are examples at the bottom of almost every one of them.
You might be thinking of
infopages. Themanpages are just the instructions, feature flags, etc. generally, whileinfo(when available) usually has a more general / layman description of the command with examples.Hrm, I checked the manpage for grep on my Mac an there are a number of examples. I checked it on Linux and there’s one example. I must be spoiled by the BSD’s.
It’s possible. A lot of things merge the info and man pages now if both are installed, that could be the case here. Or Mac just documents it further.
There’s other ways to get info. And man pages are a great way to learn how something is expected to work on your system. And it’s offline, without ads, scams, ai generated false info.
as a professional sociotechnical problem solver I will join you on this fatal hill
like take the 4 types of documentation in diátaxis
manpages usually fulfill the reference need, and sometimes kind of that of how-to guides if you’re lucky and your localmanhas examplesbut that leaves more than 50% of documentation needs lacking
and discoverability is atrocious – you have to already know that the command (or commands) you need exists and what it’s called
one of the most useful things I learned in a linux sysadmin course was
apropos/man -k, which lets you search installedmanpages by keyword. but hardly anyone else seems to know about it – I only learned of it because a teaching assistant mentioned it off hand! – and even then it only helps if you guess the right keyword for your problemI am vexed by this situation
People don’t know about man -k because of all the man pages they should have read, they forgot the man one.
I think it should be the default if you don’t use parameters. A little usage help and the list of commands (with a “do you want to see the list of commands? (Y/n)” message)
It’s a good thing there are other resources, then. You can read tldr-pages. You can look at various official and unofficial wikis. You can look at Stackoverflow. You can look at Youtube tutorials. You can ask other people. Hell, you can ask a chatbot.
If the average user is unwilling to do that, maybe it’s better that Linux does not see a wider adoption.
is the fact that people can with effort and error figure out how to do something a reason not to make it easier for them to do?
I mean
you can in theory write multi-threaded bug-free C code – just read the docs and the specs and the source of your libs and never ever do something that seems to work but is subtly fatally incorrect
and yet we still have golang and rust and many other options to do things more safely and easily
if someone wants to use Linux but doesn’t want to memorize the Hundred Mandatory Commands and Thousand Flags lest they accidentally
cat > /dev/sda, why shouldn’t there be a system for them?The community abhors change. Especially changes that break conventions, even informal ones. Look at the temper tantrums people are throwing because Wayland does things differently from X.org. Changing output redirection in Bash, or how
ddworks, or any number of long-standing conventions because new users are unwilling to adapt to a new system and might end updding over the root partition would break established workflows, and worse, existing scripts and services.But the solution already exists, it’s called wrapper programs. You don’t have to manually update AUR packages because
yayandparualready do that. You don’t have to figure out howfdiskandmkfswork because Gparted and Partition Manager do it for you.Nevertheless, using a system should always and forever be the user’s responsibility. Otherwise Linux would turn into a locked-down play pen like Apple products.
Agreed! You can look elsewhere, and that’s how I, and I think many other folks, learned. The OP was talking about the manuals though, specifically mentioning
/usr/bin. So to restate my point is not to say it’s impossible to learn linux, but that man pages are weird and bad place to push folks looking to learn.
Name calls people who read documentation.
Does not offer any alternative.
“No John, you are the neckbeards!”
I use the neckbeard to destroy the neckbeard
initially when I was learning linux. I had troubles finding the command I needed. I could have first gone and read everything and then come back to try, which I did. But sometimes the man pages, the ubuntu and arch forums weren’t as great of a help as messing up myself.
Could there be a better way to document with slightly more examples: yes. Would it help: tons
But this is just my opinion, and I am just a noob
THIS. I feel like linux
manpages are as useful as an Analytical mechanics textbook for someone who just wants to drive. Like yes, sure, it’s amazing we have such a detailed documentation but for God’s sake just introduce basic usages firstssh connects and logs into the specified destination, which may be specified as either [user@]hostname or a URI of the form ssh://[user@]hostname[:port]
ssh [admin@]192.168.1.1 ssh: Could not resolve hostname ]192.168.1.1: No address associated with hostnameThat’s how I would interpret that part of the man page had I no familiarity with ssh. It doesn’t seem reasonable to expect the reader to know what those brackets mean.
Agreed, and I think a larger part of it is that most folks pick it up based on context after long enough, so it’s rarely explained. The square brackets are optional arguments. So I could use
ssh 192.168.1.1orssh postimo@192.168.1.1with the first asking for the account after I connect, and the second just asking for the password. You can see how the computer took it in the response you got.hostname ]192.168.1.1being it saw theand assumed everything after was the hostname and included the ]It’s worth noting that you can’t just connect to a random machine like this, they need to also be running an ssh server. But I wouldn’t expect you to know that without reading a great deal more of the documentation 🫠
I’ve been using ssh for decades, you don’t have to explain it to me. It was a purely contrived example to simulate what I think a new user might experience if faced with that particular man page as their only documentation.
Oh my mistake, I didn’t mean to demean at all. Yeah I think even in your example there are baked in knowledge we’ve picked up that we don’t realize, and that a very likely response from fully fresh eyes would seeing the synopsis is “oh this isn’t for me.”
No worries, didn’t feel demeaned but wanted to be clear that it was an attempt to try to ignore ~23 years of ssh muscle memory to try to guess what might trip up a new Linux user
Very much true in my case - I couldn’t explain what the, like… “idiomatic” meaning of those brackets is, I only guess from context and experience, and it remains a minor peeve of mine that such symbology is widely used but rarely explained
You get to learn the notation conventions with <> and [] fairly early on. Maybe a very new user would make that mistake. If he doesn’t get it fairly quick, maybe computers aren’t for him.
Nah m8, I’m generally on board with asking people to read the manual, but these unexplained conventions are nonsense. Pages really should be explicit about notation being added to commands that aren’t actually a part of them
They’re explained right at the beginning of the manpage.
The man manpage. I’m sure it was the first one you read? Because you wanted to know how man worked?
Sure, but that is very far from obvious, and very few people who don’t already have an understanding of this stuff are going to know to look there. When I search for how to do something on the internet I mostly find 2 kinds of sources: stuff that’s way dumbed down (and usually out of date/incorrect) and stuff full of unexplained notation/abbreviations/arbitrary conventions without any links to resources that explain them.
I guess my issue with the man pages is mostly that they just don’t try to be approachable to the not-so-tech-litterate folk who might be interested in Linux if we had resources that didn’t assume all this foreknowledge.
I guess my issue with the man pages is mostly that they just don’t try to be approachable to the not-so-tech-litterate folk who might be interested in Linux if we had resources that didn’t assume all this foreknowledge.
That’s a fair point. Their problem is that they both have to be relatively concise and as exhaustive as possible, which makes it difficult to be user friendly. So the style is usually terse and more friendly to seasoned users than to the new ones.
I think beginning users would do well to invest in something like an introductory ORiley book rather than rely on the often highly dubious online stuff. I’ve seen so many absolutely atrocious “Linux for beginners” pages that I really wouldn’t recommend any.
This mentality suuucckkss
hard agree
BS. I’ve been using linux for over 20 years and I still don’t know what those mean. I can only guess from context. It’s a stupid convention to just use symbols like that and never explain it.
Read the man manpage and all will be revealed.
Following the openbsd example from the original comment I replied to, it has absolutely nothing to say about what brackets mean, so this advice would not be helpful for an openbsd system: https://man.openbsd.org/man
On my personal linux system (arch derivative, by the way), it at least mentions brackets meaning optional, but only in the context of arguments:
[-abc] any or all arguments within [ ] are optional.I think this would trip up some new users. The destination, with or without the username to connect as, may not seem like an “argument” to a new user since it doesn’t have a dash before it like the example does
this advice would not be helpful for an openbsd system
Sorry, I wasn’t aware of that. BSD usually has excellent
panman pages.Here’s the relevant section in the Linux one:
The following conventions apply to the SYNOPSIS section and can be used as a guide in other sections. **bold text** type exactly as shown. *italic text* replace with appropriate argument. [-abc] any or all arguments within [ ] are optional. -a|-b options delimited by | cannot be used together. argument ... argument is repeatable. [expression] ... entire expression within [ ] is repeatable.The destination, with or without the username to connect as, may not seem like an “argument” to a new user since it doesn’t have a dash before it like the example does
Then the new user should real the ssh manpage which very clearly specifies that it is.
Here
for application in /usr/bin/*; do man $application; doneget going
I work in IT. I’ve read so many manuals that I don’t need to read manuals almost ever.
As soon as you learn the design language for stuff, it usually just makes sense where to find stuff and how to fix it. It’s rare that I have a problem that I can’t solve just by looking at it.
If I ever get stuck, guess what? I RTFM. That’s basically my job. I RTFM because end users can’t be arsed to do it themselves. If everyone read the manual, I’d be out of a job.
I dread the day the users read the manual
I doubt that day will ever come
In many cases you get hired for having the knowledge and experience instead of just having skills.
Maybe. But in my experience, the most valuable team members are not the ones with the experience, but the ones that are curious and resourceful.
Many linux CLI tools also tend to have similar names for arguments with similar effects.
That also reduces the re-reading.quick everyone, stop RTFM ! save this man’s job !
Lol. I think it’s more likely that I’ll win the lottery than users RTFM enough for me to worry about my job.
It’s just a funny thought that any of them would try.
Part of the fun of buying a game was getting to RTFM on the way home.
public transit, ftw… unless “I wish I died pecefully like my grandfather… the driver who was RTFMing, instead of his screaming passengers”
Last time I could buy a game with an instruction manual I was lucky that I could ride in a car without a car seat.
One of my pet peeves is how many new things do not come with a manual and I have to go and find one. I am one of the fortunate ones who can learn by reading and then trying. It seems that many cannot.
Yes in the 80s electronic equipment like TVs even came with electrical schematics in the box. Not really intended for most end users (repairing a CRT is quite dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing) but to help the repair guy. No extended warranty scams, no approved dealers get parts only. Just all the help they could offer.
Now there’s a one page leaflet in the box showing where the on button is and for the rest you’ll have to find the pdf.
Software came with thick ring binders describing every feature and updates came with inserts to put at the right places in the binders. Manuals actually were useful.
Yup, good luck trying to find user’s manual for Android for example
Then came built-in obsolescence…
or the manuals now are complete shit.
When the company doesn’t want you repairing the stuff you paid them for, they don’t make good manuals.
Y’all not just out there vibe OSing?
I work in maintenance, people act like I’m doing magic, but 90% of the time all I’ve done is read the fucking manual, the other 10% is just basic awareness.
It’s literally all this, all the way down until the turtles.
Holds manual
Squints
Turtles🦋 is this… Turtle Power?
Wasn’t it just one turtle down there?
Nah, it’s turtles all the way down.
I was thinking Pratchett.
Does reading medicine books count too? Since we’re all driving human bodies 24/7? Or is it just turtles down to the bottom of the tech layer.
100% yes. Where there is no Doctor or basically the owner’s manual and operation guide.
Its fucking impossible to get new kids to read the manual. They just resort to asking others for stuff they could look up. When I was new I asked the old timers as a last resort. Not because they’d be mean about it, but because I know I wouldn’t learn as well just being handed information.
It’s not a generational thing, I’ve worked with folks from all age ranges, old timers are just as bad about it as younger people and those from my age range, you’ve either got it or you don’t. Stupidity and arrogance are human traits, not generational ones.
I take RTFM more broadly to mean that I at least put in some effort to solve the problem myself. I googled, checked forum posts, read the man page, opened a config file or two and read some comments, etc. So I get offended when I get RTFM’d.
If you can’t reply without being a dick, then keep scrolling! Why participate in a forum where people with less experiece ask questions in the first place? That time could be better spent reading your shop vac manual or figuring out who you need to blow to save $700 on a dishwasher repair.
Yup.
What even is your problem that you’ll get worked up enough to spend energy spreading misery over some tiny annoyance from some internet stranger? Do you get pleasure out of that? If so, for shame.
When I get annoyed by some internet stranger’s conduct online, I don’t engage. I disengage. Life’s too short to get worked up over the little things I find, and we’ll all feel better when we don’t engage in that negativity.
Yes, I’ve blocked people without ever saying a single word. Sometimes while lurking, I’ll find some conduct (not beliefs, conduct) that I disagree with. I don’t then go on and admonish them, I make them “disappear” from my life, then go on thinking about what I should eat for dinner.
I don’t understand why some internet users are like this. Like it costs literally nothing to be nice. The only people who spread hate and insults online are those who have a miserable real life, so not worth engaging with.
Let me firstly say that I 100% agree with all of the above. And secondly, I don’t work in tech.
But I think most of the frustration from the grey beards is possibly because they’re burnt out. They’ve probably been answering the same questions their entire life. And there comes a point when the actual answer becomes, RTFM.
I don’t agree it’s an appropriate response. The mere fact that the acronym has profanity in it suggests it’s an aggressive response.
I’ve been on forums before where, instead of saying “RTFM”, someone had just linked me to the appropriate man page… Essentially the same message, but far more helpful and a much less insulting.
In my opinion it’s not wrong to tell someone to read the manual, especially if the answer is in it, but it’s how you say it that matters.
Well said!
I think a lot of documentation just fly over my head. I have a masters degree in mathematics, but so many manuals have such deeply ingrained “tribal” language that everyone takes for granted that you know.
If you have a good starting point for a poor linux noob to read manuals, hit me up.
(That being said, I DO read the manuals for appliances and all that. THAT stuff is luckily easy)
My biggest annoyance with man pages are that built-ins are a separate command and that there is no way to print all man pages but the first with the man command. That’s right. There’s no way to print every page for a command, 1 through 7 or whatever, with a flag. I am confidently saying there’s no way to do it.
👀
Hoping someone wants to correct me because I want an alias that prints all pages as one. Would also be nice if it did it for built-ins.
I hardly think memorizing every useless fact in a manual and blowing the technician is the best way to learn. In Linux I encounter problems and seek the answers then I know how to apply this knowledge in the future. This isn’t dynastic China where we must memorize the five great books (/usr/bin, fridge, stove, furnace, and the analects) in order to progress in life.
OP may be a master of RTFM, but they clearly didn’t read through that passage before posting. Blowing the technician is a good way to save money, but maybe not the best way to learn.
Jeez, maybe the technican deserves a nice blowie, field work isn’t easy y’know.
chill out, it was 2012, the last time he truly felt alive
“I don’t have the money to pay for this
pizzaappliance repair…”Is that you step brother?
Lol. That’s exactly what I did in the early 90s. ls /usr/bin, then man at, or whatever it was that came first, and work onwards from there.
Moreso when I installed my own Unix machine (briefly Minix, quickly replaced by Linux) and had to actually learn how to manage it.But then I came from a mix of 8 bit, PC and semi big iron (Tandem) culture where any machine you used would matter of factly come with a litteral wall of binders containing documentation for pretty much anything (which led to the fun regular “documentation day” where you had to manually “patch” the documentation by replacing pages in all the binders with updated ones).
Anyway knowing what the fuck you were doing was pretty much expected. So everyone spent a lot of time perusing documentation.Of course nowadays, to read documentation, you first have to find it, which can be quite a challenge in itself. But at least the manpages are still there.
