RTFM is Sage
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Honestly, who has the time? I could read the manual or I could enjoy my life instead.
That's your choice, but you don't get to then complain about the prices set by the people who read the manual for you so that you could enjoy your life instead. You either pay them or pay yourself.
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Never forget what they took from us.
Half of US adults can't read at a 6th grade level. This is haunting.
Some strikingly high percentage can't complete complicated tasks on a computer (eg: find 3 user email addresses and add them to a spreadsheet).
Reading the manual is good advice but I think some people are just left behind
I feel like a big problem is that a lot of people never learned how to learn.
Adding onto your examples, I've also heard about a study once where they were given similar basic Excel tasks. However, you didn't even have to solve the tasks. Instead, just trying to get help from the help function or searching online got you into the highest skill bracket. That bracket ended up being the smallest group.
The only manual I need is the one that tells me how to shut his pompous ass up.
now people just "ask GPT"... "I asked chatGPT".
my answer is "dude, GPT just copypasted from the fucking manual so you don't have to read. congrats, you didn't learn a fucking thing."
it's depressing
Its the damn truth. Either rtfm which is the easy way since your predecesors made it for you or tinker with shit by trial and error untill you figure it out all on your own. Otherwise you are just lazy.
Sorry, I have a chronic medical condition that makes reading manuals physically painful, which prevents me from reading the manual until I encounter a problem that requires me to read it, at which point I will have likely discarded it. And if I haven't, I will only read through the part that contains the information I need to know to solve the problem and then immediately forget it after.
Yeah sure, unless the manual reads like a white paper from the 80s... Ya know like every man page ever
RTFDS is the equivalent for electric engineering enthusiasts. Itโs supposed to be tedious af, but I honestly enjoy reading data sheets for some god forsaken reason.
This could be me, I started on unix before Linux existed. I was on HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, Solaris1/2, and I did the same thing, went in /usr/bin, did a ls, man all the commands, this is how I learnt unix command, shell, awk, grep, sed, etc.
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My biggest annoyance with man pages are that built-ins are a separate command and that there is no way to print all man pages but the first with the man command. That's right. There's no way to print every page for a command, 1 through 7 or whatever, with a flag. I am confidently saying there's no way to do it.
๐
Hoping someone wants to correct me because I want an alias that prints all pages as one. Would also be nice if it did it for built-ins.
copypasta levels
Not everyone learns the same way. I've mostly found man pages to be pretty opaque. Finding examples online that are relevant to my specific use case have been much more useful to me.
i could be reading some fucking manuals right now instead of lemmy...
My entire job is basically reading manuals ๐
Started a new job as a tool tech in a rental center; maintaining, repairing, and simply showing people how to operate, a ton of different tools, some of which I've never even seen before.
First thing I did is setup a file share on my server that I've populated with 70+ manuals and growing by the day...
Read through them all myself to understand the nuances of each machine and be able to explain the details to customers; plus I can print them a fresh copy on demand just for good measure.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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