Clarification: Just making fun of people(including myself) who watch shitty videos instead of official documentation.
I really like the man pages, but they’re an encyclopedia, not a tutorial. Great for looking up specifics when you already have a foundation. Not so great when starting out
When I was first learning programming I had a teacher who insisted that the only resource we could was the Java docs.
When you want to know what parameters you need to pass or what certain flags do, it’s a great resource. When you don’t even know how to iterate through an array, it’s not the first place to look.
Man pages are for people who already know a lot about Linux and understand all the nuances and understanding of Linux
Even after using Linux for many many years I still don’t understand wtf nearly all man pages mean. It’s like a fucking codex. It needs to be simplified but not to the extreme where it doesn’t give you information you need to understand it.
Tbh that’s most of Linux, not designed for average people, designed by Linux users who think that all others should know everything about Linux.
They also usually assume a lot about the users’ knowledge of the domain of the program itself.
In my experience, many programs’ man/help is very brief, often a sentence or less per command/flag, with 2 or more terms that don’t mean anything to the uninitiated. Also, even when I think I know all the words, the descriptions are not nearly precise enough to confidently infer what exactly the program is going to do.
Disclaimers for potentially dangerous/irreversible actions are also often lacking.
Which is why I almost always look for an article that explains a command using examples, instead of trying to divine what the manual authors had in mind.
l must be using man pages very differently from you. To me they are mostly the easy reference to check the available flags for a command, and sometimes the reference on available config file entries, e.g. ssh_config(5)
For those things I was using them quite soon when I started using Linux, because it’s quicker than googleing every time if you just need one flag or one option name. For more complex things, like tar-and-gzip in one which needs like four, I still google though.
Probably there are very complicated ones too, the ones explaining subsystems or APIs of the kernel, but those I don’t need as a user.
Man pages fucking suck, and I say that having been working with linux full time professionally for 11 years.
The best ones have plenty of examples.
You ask someone for instructions
They send you some bullshit 10 minutes long video
Now instead of ctrl+f or skimming the article and jumping where you want to go you need to jump around in a video
REEEE
I have a theory a lot of people are functionally illiterate and thus prefer videos as they can’t skim well
Or maybe they just grok things more effectively via verbal instruction and visual aids?
Man pages are useful references but go ahead and learn how to use sed or awk from their man pages.
Yep.
That’s what the RTFM folks don’t seem to understand: if you didn’t even know, what you’re looking for, you can’t look it up.
This in general is the main reason for the ai surge. Just dump the 2 sentence explanation into a prompt and hope something sensible comes from it rather than googling for half an hour.
No, make it like this:
I have a problem with program x. Please tell me how i do y if I want z. Use this man page for reference:
[insert man page into promt py copy paste]
This gives way better results.
