How do you guys actually learn how to fix certain things? Its mind boggling how one can visit a forum and there’s people saying “oh yeah just run -c xhhkrk ()<>[] bbbhjl and that will fix your sound issue”

Like WHERE do you even start? I hate having to look things up all the time when everyone else on windows “just works”. Copying commands off forums endlessly doesn’t really help you learn.

Example, installed cachyos on an older laptop, but sound and screen dimming will not work. I have no ides where to even begin with that. I feel like a windows user could at least poke around control panel and probably fix the issue but its way harder with linux.

I have had luck with almost everything working with mint on my desktop (except vr, oculus is a nighmare to get working) and have been running that about a year. If I had to set it all up again id have to re look up everything I forgot since then…

If there was something like man but easier to parse through, that would be immensely helpful. Like for my sound issue, if there was a better organized manual that I could look under “sound” and see the inner workings laid out and common issues, thats what we need. Otherwise people are going to be terrified of linux because its so hard.

  • kumi@feddit.onlineEnglish
    2·
    14 hours ago

    When you don’t even know where to begin:

    • Arch Wiki search
    • Docs and wiki for your distro
    • StackExchange search
    • Sometimes other distro wikis like Gentoo and Debian have some pointers
    • Forum search (distros, lemmy, reddit, project issues and discussions)

    That should give you one or more possible solutions involving commands. Don’t just run them right away. If they’re new packages you need to install, you can check some basic package metadata like website URL either via your distros web interface or package manager itself:

    pacman -Si packagename  
apt-cache show packagename

    Once installed, hopefully you have man page showing up for man command. If not, they or some other reference docs should be available on the web. Try to find the official resources instead of clickmill tutorial blogs and LLM ramblings like deepwiki. Many but not all commands will give you some usage explanation by passing --help. Any flags/parameters you found in solutions should be explained here. Try to understand the solution/example you were given and what you should expect it to do. Maybe you want to change, add, or remove some arguments for your scenario.

    If any files are mentioned, you can open and read them in a text editor. If the command is expected to change anything, or you need to edit config files, you can back those up before you go to town.

    Basic cli utilities I use all the time that will help you a lot to be comfortable with: cat less grep diff sudo tee tree head tail curl wget dmesg. If you are ambitious then sed awk jq. If your system uses systemd then systemctl journalctl. No need to remember every single flag but bit by bit you pick up what’s relevant for you. And any terminal text editor (nano, (neo)vim, emacs, helix) for sudo edits.

    When you want to recall what you did before, you should be able to search your shell history with Ctrl+R. You can put searchable reminders for your future self with comments: brightnessctl s '-10%' # dim monitor decrease screen brightness.