Comment by sgarland

12-year-old me had (or rather, my family had) a Celeron 333 MHz and a Pentium III 550 MHz, both from Gateway, because that was the sole awesome perk my dad got from working there: literally free computers, with a required number of years of employment to pay them off. In 2000, the P3 was still pretty hot shit. I dual-booted them with every Linux distro under the sun. Since we had dial-up, the only way I had those distros was from 4-H [0], which at the time in Nebraska had a partnership with University of Nebraska to do tech instruction; once a quarter, we’d drive down to a campus (usually UNL) and spend a weekend learning something (LAMP stack, hardware troubleshooting, etc.), and having a LAN party at night. Also we had free access to their (at the time) screamingly fast internet, so I would download distros and packages to try out later.

My online upbringing was very much of the RTFM variety, and I am convinced that was and is a good method to learn. It’s not like the grumpy graybeards were cruel, they just didn’t want to waste their time answering the same “how do I…” questions from noobs. If you explained what you were experiencing, what you had read, and what you had tried, they were more than happy to help out. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable approach.

[0]: https://4-h.org/