Or someone asked a question on Reddit and got an answer, but then it was removed due to a protest. All you get is the reply “Thank you so much! It works now”
Honestly I was so mad when I noticed that whole thing kicking off… I had SO MANY PROBLEMS solved by finding answers on reddit…
Obligatory: Fuck Spez… Greedy POS.
i’ve been there too… i understand your pain panel 4
Me lately trying to figure out how to do anything on Linux
At least you’re in the right place bro (Arch btw)
Thanks bro. Maybe I’ll get to Arch one day. 🙂
At this point, all I know that “I use Arch btw” is a meme, which means it’s either a great choice or an awful choice.
It’s great for some people, awful for others. It became a meme because it started to be suggested to everyone even though it’s an awful first introduction to the Linux ecosystem.
It’s a choice, it’s just a funny meme that half of folks I these circles want to die and half will use anyway lol.
You do you bud, there’s no One Beat Distro and a lot of em can be bent into whatever shape you need anyway.
I mean, that is still what I mean. For you - it sounds like a great choice. For the people who want it to die, it might be an awful choice. It’s polarizing, but that doesn’t always mean good. It’s hard to make an informed decision even with a popular choice.
Ah I think I was unclear. The meme is what folks get tired of, the distro is a popular one on its own or as a base for others.
If you’re interested in looking into Linux but don’t know where to start, the only thing you really need to know is how much time you’re willing to put into learning it, and how big the community is. Arch has a huge amount of documentation, but will make things a little harder if you want stuff to “just work”. Debian is more of a middle ground (but huge community), and Mint is a popular easier to get into environment but honestly I’m out of the loop on that one these days.Arch is actually the base of the one I use at the moment for gaming and dev work (EndeavourOS). Options are overwhelming, I get it 😁
The cool thing? Try em all. You can easily find simple installers to slap a whole distro onto a bootable thumb drive and goof off while you feel things out. If you don’t like it, reboot. If your wifi doesn’t work and you can’t find a solution online in a few minutes, reboot. Things are easier and more flexible now then they’ve ever been, but the new user experience is still where Linux really struggles.
Anyway, I’m super into this shit clearly. 😆 Happy to point you in a more solid direction if you want at some point, or I can just shut up lol
You’re lying, no Linux user use chrome
What about that says chrome?
This is why I only search somethingawful’s archives for answers to my questions.
Me scrolling through 150 stackoverflow pages and ‘helpful’ third party websites that don’t answer my question
Lmgtfy used to be a great site to send to people when they asked easily googled questions. Now it’s a bloated shit site that barely works if it even still exists. It would do a flash animation on how to go to Google.com, type in their question and click search. I always got a kick out of sending it to people. R.i.p old Internet. You were great.
This was always dickhead behaviour, but not for the reasons you guys are circlejerking about. Often the answers to these questions are extremely easy to find online (even today, Google is nowhere near as useless as people make it out to be). But the entire point of asking other people through social media or a forum is because you want to engage in discussion with other humans. That’s literally the entire point of these websites: to foster discussion, both for the sake of learning and for the social entertainment we all need. People who sign up to them and then completely shutdown attempts to start discussions are absolutely braindead and don’t understand any of this. Modern forms of social media only encourage this kind of performative social interaction. So many people seem to think the sole purpose of discussion-based social media is to dunk on others with a vicious reply and “win” by earning more points (ratio) instead of having an actual back and forth discussion with another human.
I mean, there has definitely been a noticeable and significant decline in the quality of search engine results, particularly on Google. It used to stand out at least a little bit from Bing (a search engine that went very hard into inserting ads into results early on), but they’ve essentially become indistinguishable. Aesthetics and connections with other platforms like Gmail and YouTube have become the only real reason to stay with one over the other.
Sure, I completely that it has declined significantly. I think the comments in this thread about it “sucking cock”, being “just ads and SEO crap”, or a “bloated, shit site” are hyperbole though. It is still the best search engine for most use-cases and queries, including finding answers to “how do I do X” type questions. I use DuckDuckGo (AKA Bing) but only because it gets close enough to Google’s results to be a superior choice for me overall when I take into account its massive privacy advantages. In terms of results, there is still enough of a gap that I will occasionally need to rely on Google’s results for particular queries. I actually used to use StartPage for this exact reason and only switched because it had issues with VPNs.
it’s crazy how those comments are aging like milk precisely because google/web search is going to shit (in addition to being dickhead comments ofc)
just weird to look back and think about how we thought it would never change
YouTube searches are also truly awful, and have been for around a year.
a friend of mine discovered the tip to add “before:2025” (or, the current year+1) to your yt search to improve it. i have no clue why that does anything but it reverts it to pre-enshittified functionality
To give google 1(one) droplet of credit, the enshittification didn’t come from them alone. In fact I’m fairly sure that if they could get their way, the page would still return useful results, only, JUST below all the paid ads. SEO Spam doesn’t help THEM either.
The problem is… A lot of the “good” results on google came from like. Enthusiast websites. Webforums. And… Reddit.
Enthusiast Websites are much rarer now. They got consolidated into media conglomerates and then closed down. Only a few remain.
Webforums are in a similar zombified state, most got vored by “social media” and Discord (P.S.: if you are a dev or artist or whatever and use a Discord server as the main helpline/download source for a project you’re doing, fuck you very much, you are the ACTUAL worst <3), which aren’t indexed by search engines.
Then Reddit got Spez’d, so THAT avenue is fucked too.
Fedi isn’t indexed by search engines either (AFAIK), so you can’t do the old “<Search terms> reddit” trick replacing reddit with lemmy. It won’t work.
linux mint forums
Nevermind, have figured it out.
<thread closed with NO FUCKING ASWER kthxbye>
Like I said in a previous thread that ended up on this topic. There’s a special place in hell, with Satan from Little Nicky, a few pineapples and some lobsters to hang off these asshole’s nipples…
Why do I always click on these even though I know exactly what it will be?
xkcd is so good I don’t mind reading it over and over
Described: Why whenever I figure something out myself after posting a help thread, I’ll write a whole report on what I did before it got fixed (because often I’m just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks, and I never know what exactly moved the needle)
Those threads with “fixed it!” and no instructions? If they’re on reddit, I’m posting “I deleted system32 and the problem went away!”
If it’s Linux related say “open a terminal and do
sudo rm -rf /” for similar life-ruining effects.sudo rm -rf /
Ok, so I retroactively removed the realm of France and now a bunch of Spanish people are pissed about living too close to Luxembourg and the number of great cheeses in the world has decreased by 80%!
What now?
Now you remove Britain as well, and the healing can begin.
Not sure about [x], but here’s how you do [y]
It may be pronounced goople.fart, but it’s spelled goople.farht.
I’ll see myself aus.
It was even wrose when there was a site by the name “let me google it for you”, which insulted you while made an animation about how to use this “not evil” website google. You google “how to do [X]” find a nice looking forum, and people either are angry that OP didn’t google it, or they deceptively linked to a lmgify page.
After a month of suffering, I instead reinstalled Windows XP, which I had a lot of trouble with (fugly UI, stability issues, performance issues, etc), but not as much as with the “king of stability”, Linux.
Lol
I always used to use “Let me bing it for you” at least then it was probably something they hadn’t tried, and it was proper trolling instead of just being passive aggressive
And when you finally find some helpful forum with content from 15 years ago, you’ll have someone be like “GUYS I FIGURED IT OUT! Here’s a [broken] link to someone else who solved it” with a dozen or so “Thanks, that solved the issue immediately for me!” Comments after it.
Amount of broken links is crazy. I always try checking internet archive, but they often don’t have stuff like that.
People who write a whole novel about “google is your friend” and try to make you feel stupid for asking a question are the ultimate assholes. You wrote 3 paragraphs just to bully a stranger on the internet when 1 sentence could have answered the question. Thanks for being a royal knob head.
google is not your friend. it is a tool at best.
It’s that one tool at your work that needs replacement, but management refuses to do more than clean and reapply a new layer of duct tape so long as it still gets the job done eventually, forcing workers to struggle with it until giving up and finding an alternative solution that doesn’t rely on it.
Such a fucking tool.
I just googled ‘is google my friend’ and google told me it was not my friend. Help.
Anybody remember this site? Google used to be so good that anybody with half a brain could find a good result if they would just type a basic phrase into it.
My sweet summer child, issues with google search existed in 2008, things just accelerated at a massive rate once it became the de facto standard and people figured out how to manipulate search results.
“My sweet summer child” is a very weird way to start a comment response. It sounds condescending.
It’s supposed to
