I thought I wa not not going to use this short posts page to write anything technical, but I think being a “power user” does not have anything with writing about shit software engineering topics. Anyway, I think I know a fundamental issue new Linux users face, that’s not really focused on, it is the understanding of different layers/level of their operating system. This issue is almost unidentifiable in the other operating systems’ communities, although it’s there. An example that I’ve personally seen was asking this question, “I’ve a DELL laptop, how can I fix this issue with X software?”. The question has an unrelated detail that reflects an uncomprehending state of whatever they are using, they should probably ask how do I fix that on Windows 7 or whatever. Most of the time people who try to help deduce whatever OS or platform they are talking about (mostly from the X), so it is not really a problem on these platforms. However, with Linux, it does really matter especially that the situation on Linux scarce when it comes to packaging everything. Ubuntu is probably the only Linux distribution that gets the best out of that, for example let’s assume that question: how to fix the ugly terminal font in my Ubuntu laptop? well just open gnome settings and change it from there. Once you knew that whoever is asking is an Ubuntu user you know for sure that they are using gnome terminal.

Now let’s assume that there’s a new Linux user who is looking on how to install Java or Python, they might find an official step from Oracle or Python websites to do something like this:

 tar xvf Python-3.2.8.tgz
 cd Python-3.2.8
 ./configure --prefix=/opt/python
 make
 sudo make install

Which is perfectly fine for a Linux power user, sometimes, but for a newbie it might cause a lot of troubles especially when they download another package from their package manager that might depend on Python (inb4 the package manager finds some files occupying the python installation location and refuses to proceed). Or they actually might just break their system while trying to resolve some issues in the make install error message. A friend of mine was about to go in this loop while trying to install yt-dlp a while ago, while following a tutorial of how to do that on Linux.

[an important side note here, the importance of asking the question the right way is not about of us, the people who might help, get their job done quicker, but for the users to understand what they are looking for, so they might not even have to ask]

Now there’s no really a straightforward way to make newbies learn how to ask the question in the correct way since appending what distribution they are using is not really helpful always: how can I fix the terrible font on Manjaro? because this barely gives enough information, yet it’s better than “how I fix it on Linux” because there are many possible variables on that, like the desktop environment, the window manager, the composer, etc.. unlike Ubuntu, you can not deduce all of that at once.

I believe that the easier way to resolve this issue on Linux is that for distribution maintainers to provide a simple way to educate users about not only the layers of their operating system but what is each layer responsible for. This way not only they can learn what to ask about, but how to customize everything as they want.