Markdown…is…plaintext, though?

I’m not even joking, that’s literally the best compliment I’ve received all month. Thank you.

What do you mean you didn’t learn assembly and compile your own kernel? Did you not read the forum rules?

Just in case the search algorithm points people here:

“What distro is best for gaming?”

Most of them are fine these days. Bazzite, CachyOS, SteamOS, and Nobara are the ones everyone seems to be talking about, and the differences between them all are probably going to come down to which games you want to play and your specific hardware.

“Will linux run on my (insert random PC specs)?”

Almost certainly yes. I don’t care what the specs are, and you might have to try more than one distro for it to nail down the most performant one, but if Windows runs on it, some flavor of Linux almost certainly will too. Even Nvidia isn’t a dealbreaker these days.

“Why does (insert Windows/MacOS program) not work on the linux? Linux is crap then!”

It probably does, and you just need a good installation guide. The only applications I’ve heard of that reliably fail to usably run on Linux with some combination of Wine tricks have been Adobe Creative Cloud and online multiplayer games that use kernel-level anticheat. You may be able to get away with using some other FOSS software replacement, or using a virtual machine to emulate Windows and run it in there, or you might find dual-booting Windows a reasonable compromise. But in any case, those applications don’t work on Linux because the developers explicitly chose to make them incompatible with Linux, and continue to patch the application so that community workarounds are broken. Adobe decided you couldn’t use their software on Linux, this isn’t a failure of the open-source community.

“Recommend me a free antivirus software for linux”

Linux. You’re probably fine; not because “nobody writes viruses for linux” (as some jokes online suggest) but because the way Linux is set up is at odds with the idea of computer viruses. Linux has a much more robust permissions system enabled by default which will prevent random programs from running without your consent. Of course you still need to be careful not to install shady packages, but that’s true on Windows too.

Hundreds of millions of websites run on Linux servers. The community is very invested in making sure that they can’t be exposed to viruses.

“Why does Arch not work on my PC from the early 2000’s?”

Have you tried plugging your computer in?

I guess I’m just really lucky, because I almost never run into those. Sometimes I find the good ol’ xkcd DenverCoder9 problem:

Lost user: (Random Monday Five Years Ago, 7:00 pm) Hey, here’s your exact problem, down to the specific language on the error message even.

Lost user: (Random Monday Five Years Ago, 8:30 pm) nvm figured it out

<Thread was locked for inactivity>

But even more often than that I actually get frustrated in the other direction:

Lost user: Hey, I’m having a problem with totally-not-grombl.

Experienced user: Oh yeah, I’ve seen that. Just run sudo grombl reload -skqq --xbs-juju '2793' and then restart your desktop environment.

Lost user: Oh thanks, that totally worked!

Meanwhile I’m like…but why did that work?! It was a completely different package and there’s no indication why the two would even be related…? And sure, it did work, but I’ve learned nothing now.

I used to be a mod on a forum for a fairly popular free program, and we generally treated even that like an information availability problem. Yes, we had an FAQ (and yes, sometimes even still people wouldn’t read it), but when there were a ton of similar questions that were all answered in the FAQ, we figured that meant that the FAQ needed a rewrite for better SEO.

In public?!

I think part of it might be how you got to the point of being rich. For some people, that’s their whole driving force and they’ve been trying for it their entire adult lives. For others, they just had an idea and it happened to hit at the right time and place. In the case of the former, getting what they always wanted was validation of everything terrible they did to get there; but for the latter, they’re just happy that they did something people think is worthwhile enough to pay them.

Elon Musk is an example of the former, Tom from Myspace is an example of the latter: Musk is like “$1T? Chump change, I’m going for $10T.” While Tom is like, “thanks for the $580 million, I’m gonna go chill and take pictures for the rest of my life.”

I don’t know if this holds up under scrutiny, but it feels right at least based on my experience.