What's a common occurrence in your hobby that you think shouldn't be?
What's a common occurrence in your hobby that you think shouldn't be?
For me it's driving while under the influence. If you couldn't tell, I like me some ganja. However I have long since held the belief that it is utterly insane to drive while under the influence of most substances, with maybe nicotine and caffeine being the exception. All too often I see other stoners smoking and driving, which I simply can't fathom. I've only operated a vehicle once under the influence and it was just to move a U-Haul around the block to a different parking spot, which was such a scary experience while high that I refuse to even consider getting behind the wheel again while high.
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Gatekeeping and acting like you're smarter than everyone else... General neckbeard behavior. Linux/Computers in general can be a great hobby if you can get past the "RTFM, yoUr stUPiD fOR asKing" people.
I work with Linux and computers professionally. Documentation is written but almost nobody reads it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve bailed out colleagues stuck on a problem by spending a few hours reading the docs and then like magic some parameter in the API solves everything. I’ve been bailed out countless times in the same way. Software and computers are complex and even those who do RTFM miss things, because documentation is information dense, often written as an afterthought to the code, and APIs are not always even internally consistent with the documentation.
But the toxicity culture around that needs to go. I love it when people geek out over distro-hopping and whatnot, but superiority complexes over what distro you use (“Arch, btw I’m so much better than you”) is fucking stupid.
Imo, a lot of linux documentation and documentation in general is written in a way that assumes you know what it's talking about... When it's the documentation's job to teach you about said things...
This has been my struggle. I read the documentation before posting to linux groups. And even saying that you just get "wHaT r U sToOpId!? rTfM aGaIn!" Like just rereading it will magically reveal terms that I didn't understand the first 3 times. I gave up on trying to switch to linux.
I think my last straw was I was talking about establishing an SFTP server in OpenBSD (I know, unix not linux, don't bother; same kinds of people in both) and I had a typo in my question and it was a very benign unimportant typo and some pedantic fuckwad had a mental fucking breakdown because he was now confused if I really wanted SFTP or FTP and how FTP was insecure blah blah...the whole thread was about setting up SFTP wtf would you think that changed in the middle because I forgot the S on SFTP in the middle of a discussion on setting up SFTP. Too many pedantics in the community and even when I like software I don't want to be associated/involved with that level of unempathetic autistic assholery.
Yeah, those are the exact kind of people I'm referring to. They are annoying, however not "I hate this hobby now, fck it all" annoying, to me anyways. And Idk if it's just me, but I've encountered less of them here on lemmy than on smth like reddit, even when I've asked stupid questions.
I work in gamedev and its really baffling how rare is for someone to read the docs. I've already solved so many issues by just reading through the related docs and discovering a feature that does exactly the thing we've been trying to solve with a workaround, or had a overcomplicated process for doing, while it could have been a single function/API call.
Read the docs people! You probably have a lot of downtime while waiting for stuff to build/compile, and just rabdomly (or systematically) scrolling through the reference or docs of the library/tool your working with, even when not looking for something specific, may save you a lot of time in the long run. Knowing what are your tools capable off is well worth the effort.