Silicon Forest Developer/hacker. I write about Generative AI, DevOps, and Linux mostly.
Once held the world record for being the youngest person alive.
Yeah it's mostly a joke and a bit of a meme out there these days. I tried to do my part to make it not toxic.
But on the original topic, Gentoo was a lot of fun for me, I found the compiling all the time to be less and less worth it when I wanted to get stuff done. Has that improved these days? I know with CPUs being what they are it has to be better. I remember spending entire weekends compiling a Gentoo build, then I would set up long compiles overnight for updates.
I was a Gentoo noob in those days and I never found any toxic community, thay where very strict tho, all already answered question got a link to the related question and to the forum guidelines just before the post was closed or just a RTFM. I guess that may be considered rude but that's why those days no other forum got close to que quality of Gentoos. Arch on the other hand, I've seen users making valid questions berated. Non-pure Arch users being almost insulted and don't even dare to mention systemd, you'll get dozens of toxic comments. As you mentioned Gentoo made try before asking, read the guidelines and documentation first and always be polite, you are asking for someone else time after all. Arch tought me, Arch is great, wiki is awesome, don't bother with the forums. Lucky me after years of Gentoo, when I used Arch never need the forum.
Silicon Forest Developer/hacker. I write about Generative AI, DevOps, and Linux mostly.
Once held the world record for being the youngest person alive.
I don't hang out in the Arch forums either. In fact, many Linux forums are toxic and full of smug people that bash newbies.
I don't understand it, I consider myself an advanced Linux user. Been using it since the mid-90s. I've run Gentoo, Arch, and even Linux from Scratch. I've never felt the need to use that as a reason to one-up someone or make them feel inferior.
I'm just the opposite, the more I learn the more I want to drag newbies into my world. So you like Linux Mint? Cool, let me show how ____ works. I don't get the "be smug and condescending" thing.
"The problem with climbing stepping on others, is that no matter how high you get, you're not getting any taller"
-- don't remember
Starts when people wants to be better than the others, what follows is realizing that improve oneself is way harder than bring everyone else down.
Sadly as far as I've seen, forums from more "noob friendly" distros like Mint and Ubuntu, are friendlier but their answers are usually useless, with much of click here and click there, sadly 2 versions ahead, the button is not there anymore nor the tab nor the menu. Very little background of the problems, very little about the cause.
Anyhow, I've heard a lot of new people with Linux having a great time and a very good experience with communities that don't seem to exist in other platforms. Maybe we are getting old and bitter :D and our vision is tinted with years of ocassional bad experiences, we sometimes tend to remember those more than the good ones.
But on the original topic, Gentoo was a lot of fun for me, I found the compiling all the time to be less and less worth it when I wanted to get stuff done. Has that improved these days?
Yes and no. On my machines, I only have to worry about recompiling very large packages (Libreoffice, for example). Many of those monsters have binaries in-tree, though. If you do want to compile them, it still takes a long time (hours). I definitely recommend libreoffice-bin because I can't justify spending that much time compiling something that will never feel super fast anyway.
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Yeah it's mostly a joke and a bit of a meme out there these days. I tried to do my part to make it not toxic.
But on the original topic, Gentoo was a lot of fun for me, I found the compiling all the time to be less and less worth it when I wanted to get stuff done. Has that improved these days? I know with CPUs being what they are it has to be better. I remember spending entire weekends compiling a Gentoo build, then I would set up long compiles overnight for updates.
I was a Gentoo noob in those days and I never found any toxic community, thay where very strict tho, all already answered question got a link to the related question and to the forum guidelines just before the post was closed or just a RTFM. I guess that may be considered rude but that's why those days no other forum got close to que quality of Gentoos. Arch on the other hand, I've seen users making valid questions berated. Non-pure Arch users being almost insulted and don't even dare to mention systemd, you'll get dozens of toxic comments. As you mentioned Gentoo made try before asking, read the guidelines and documentation first and always be polite, you are asking for someone else time after all. Arch tought me, Arch is great, wiki is awesome, don't bother with the forums. Lucky me after years of Gentoo, when I used Arch never need the forum.
I don't hang out in the Arch forums either. In fact, many Linux forums are toxic and full of smug people that bash newbies.
I don't understand it, I consider myself an advanced Linux user. Been using it since the mid-90s. I've run Gentoo, Arch, and even Linux from Scratch. I've never felt the need to use that as a reason to one-up someone or make them feel inferior.
I'm just the opposite, the more I learn the more I want to drag newbies into my world. So you like Linux Mint? Cool, let me show how ____ works. I don't get the "be smug and condescending" thing.
To each their own I guess.
"The problem with climbing stepping on others, is that no matter how high you get, you're not getting any taller"
-- don't remember
Starts when people wants to be better than the others, what follows is realizing that improve oneself is way harder than bring everyone else down.
Sadly as far as I've seen, forums from more "noob friendly" distros like Mint and Ubuntu, are friendlier but their answers are usually useless, with much of click here and click there, sadly 2 versions ahead, the button is not there anymore nor the tab nor the menu. Very little background of the problems, very little about the cause.
Anyhow, I've heard a lot of new people with Linux having a great time and a very good experience with communities that don't seem to exist in other platforms. Maybe we are getting old and bitter :D and our vision is tinted with years of ocassional bad experiences, we sometimes tend to remember those more than the good ones.
Yes and no. On my machines, I only have to worry about recompiling very large packages (Libreoffice, for example). Many of those monsters have binaries in-tree, though. If you do want to compile them, it still takes a long time (hours). I definitely recommend libreoffice-bin because I can't justify spending that much time compiling something that will never feel super fast anyway.