@nuintari I was left unsupervised with wikipedia and taught myself subnetting and networking by clicking on every link I saw that was still blue. 🤘 It's funny how all the sexy hacking scenes never show the 36 hours of reading the documentation and piecing together like 8 peoples interpretation of how something should work.

@nuintari

In the late 1990s I did about 10 days of slack at work. Filled with
ls /bin /sbin | xargs man

I also printed
man bash
Onto paper, stapled it and left it on the desk for other slack time.

Worth it.

@nuintari
I used to do stuff like that, but before I had access to unix. No man pages, so i'd just run a program and see what it did. Turns out 'bindrest' will restore a blank Netware bindery without prompting.

@FritzAdalis Netware was the OS that traded any and all instability, and any and all possibility of comprehension of basic system operations, for the fact that it had zero documentation inline, somehow less documentation out of band.....

but ran so fracking well on near useless x86 hardware, that you could literally lose it inside a wall in a building, and expect it to keep running years later.

@nuintari
Their actual documentation wasn't bad though. I once replaced a hard drive in a Model 80 at a school that ran Netware 2.15. There were no backups, but there was a box of disks and a 3-foot shelf of manuals. I had never really used Netware (except bindrest, lol) so I started reading. It took me a week, but I got it linked and installed.

@nuintari
I once got a top-of-the-line computer for nothing because the user did not RTFM and I got it working for me because I did...

@nuintari You can go a long ways in life just being the only person in the room willing to read the error message.

@nuintari I wish I would do so also, but often tl;dr beats rtfm. In my defence, I have to say that many manuals are written quite incomprehensibly. Simple and concrete language would work here.

@nuintari I think the core is the attitude "I want to know how that works". Usually once you want to know that, you manage to find out.

You do not start with the error, but with the working system in the background.

@nuintari Unfortunately these days user manuals of consumer electronics often contain close to zero information. What they do contain instead is zillions of warnings about obvious things like the fact that an oven might be hot.

@nuintari

Oh — I thought I was the only one. 😄

Here's another tip: advertising protects the bottom line by hiding product weaknesses and making unrealistic claims. Manuals protect the support team by telling the truth about the product. When choosing a product, download the manuals and read them carefully. They'll tell you which product is really the best for you.

@nuintari '80s kid from the Soviet block: you guys have manuals?

Wtf there’s like thousands of little shits in that dir

@simon @nuintari
Unfortunately, “security” legislation often works against simple and comprehensible.

@fiee @nuintari Fair enough. I’ve often had this discussion with legal. One way out could be: a comprehensible summary up front, a legally/technically watertight manual afterwards.

@nuintari RTFM

@nuintari That's only because the man pages were written by the people who had actually written the tools they come with.
Nowadays, user manuals for devices are mostly written by the Marketing departments (or at least seem that way). When a manual starts with "Welcome into a whole new world of coffee experiences", I know that the pump cleaning instructions a few pages later are going to be absolutely useless garbage, and I better start googling for service manuals or user forums instead.