Comment by simion314
5 years ago
>In a similar vein, I think the biggest value-add that Arch has over other distros is that it turns out having the filter of "can follow well written instructions through mildly tricky commands
What is the value of "is competent enough to copy paste commands from a wiki?". Honestly I think the best bug reports might be because some Linux users probably understand C/C++ and can understand crash reports and error messages because they understand the system.
Because without that filter you are getting feedback from, at best, people who cannot even copy paste commands from a wiki.
You might be surprised how many people are out there which can't even read a wiki close enough to follow instructions in it.
Plus in my experience a lot of Arch users don't just "copy past instructions" they also somewhat understand why this instructions are needed, the Arch Wiki is grate as a resource for setting up things when you understand what you do, but it's often terrible when you just want a step by step guide.
Any way the main benefit of Arch is that it's close to stable upstream repose, instead of sometimes lacking not just month but even years behind wrt. the version of libraries they ship.
>Any way the main benefit of Arch is that it's close to stable upstream repose, instead of sometimes lacking not just month but even years behind wrt. the version of libraries they ship.
There is a downside that most Arch users omit intentionally, when you get latest GNOME/App with the cool new bug fixes and cool new features you also get the new not cool bugs and the new redesign/feature removal. This can cause the system not to boot if the kernel/graphics driver is updated in incompatible ways.
LTS distros with years behind features is in many casea a feature many appreciate. 2
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Arch Wiki is so great enough that even users of distros other than Arch read it.
That is still a pathetic filter , "I know to read and I know to copy paste", I still believer that the good reports are not from the copy-paste ,I run Arch to be cool group but from technical people that run Linux(any distro).
> I know to read and I know to copy paste
You'd be surprised. I've seen many arrogant users try to install Arch and fail because they were literally incapable of reading and understanding the simple instructions written on the Arch Wiki. Even technical users of other distributions. Sometimes they use an installer and manage to get a working system with no effort... Only for it to stop working because they failed to read the news and some update required manual intervention. If I remember correctly, users are required to provide pacman output as a form of CAPTCHA in order to create an Arch Wiki account. They must prove they installed Arch in order to edit the wiki.
A certain degree of elitism is great, no matter the community. Arch Linux users are expected to be responsible for their own systems, it's expected that they will take care of it and maintain it. People who can't or won't do this are better off using something else.
The bar can be as low as it wants to if it effectively filters people out. It's like how fizzbuzz is a terrible stupid test until you realize the shocking number of people who claim to be developers but can't pass it.
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Yet, something like 95% of all desktop users can't do that. You, presumably, disproportionally interact with tech people. Typical office worker might encounter problem that requires terminal once in a year at which point sysadmin is called. And it`s not only about reading and copy pasting it's about ability to devote pretty large amount of attention to a task.
For someone to find the wiki, read it and then attempt to solve their problem in a rudimentary fashion gets you towards the tail end of the bell curve. They might even follow up with you if you have questions.
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I'm assuming you don't generally do front-end work, because many many users are complete [insert PC word for zero capacity for rational thought].
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Being able to read and follow instructions is the main skill required to be a good bug reporter.
> What is the value of "is competent enough to copy paste commands from a wiki?"
Very high actually. You can tell them things like "please run in debug mode" or "please run with this command line flag" or even "please change this setting and retry". Even more basic, you can tell them to restart the game/program, or to reboot their computer, and then you can trust that they actually did it.
When dealing with a regular computer user, you can't assume any of these things.
From my real world experience on making desktop apps you want to get all the bug reports from all users, so you need to make it "1 click", This means add a menu /button to submit a bug report, then you popup a form where user fills stuff, you also send the log file where you collected info live OS version and other useful stuff plus the crash logs).
Same if you need to have the user run in debug mode you make it 1 click to enable/disable debug mode, usually though developers don't work directly with customers so then they don't put the effort to streamline the collection of quality bug reports.
> What is the value of "is competent enough to copy paste commands from a wiki?".
For a while, NixOS had examples throughout its manual, in the installation section, which did not together form a usable installation script, or even snippets within one. If you read the prose in the manual and used the examples as examples in the context of the prose, you'd be fine. But if you blindly copied and pasted all of the example snippets, the install would not complete.
You can watch someone ‘get filtered’ here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QujRHErFG4w
The documentation has since been revised to make the examples copy-paste safe, which is a change I endorse because I see NixOS is a tool whose adoption I want to see grow and whose community I want to welcome and educate people rather than function as a super duper cool kids club whose that makes me feel special inside. But it does show how you could up the ante from the Arch case, if you really think exclusionary obscurantism is the way forward for projects you care about.
There is a even simpler reason:
A lot of people gaming of Linux are either software developers or system administrators.
People buying a "Linux gaming system" are the rare exception, instead it's often "buy a powerful computer for use case X, and hey why not go for a slightly better/tweaked spec and also also game on it".
> buy a powerful computer for use case X, and hey why not go for a slightly better/tweaked spec and also also game on it
I'm a programmer and this is exactly what I do.