Yeah no it’s not, I offered some gentle prompts to help him refine his question into something that could be answered. As did several others.
He ignored that and tripled down with “I want to know everything”
That’s not an answerable question.
You have to want to learn before you can be taught. If you can’t listen to the prompt of “ok cool, you’re keen but pick a thing” then there’s no point me trying to help.
Yeah, to me it reads as someone who recently came from windows, where it can be more or less reasonable to “know everything” about how a user might be aloud to configure and use their OS, and doesn’t yet understand what it means to have a truly open OS
It would help if they had given more info, even if you want to know “everything” you gotta start somewhere, but even then, linux is very multi facetted, and it’s hard to teach someone without knowing what they know now
Are they already using a distro? If not start there, but if so and they’re for example using nabora then information on mint wouldn’t exactly suit them very well
That is to say, it’s a tough situation, I agree that they didn’t handle it the best, but I’m not fully certain how it should have been handled instead
You seem stuck on me supposedly not recognising he was a beginner.
I’d encourage you to re-read the two examples I gave as to what perhaps the questions he might want to ask were. I clearly did recognise that was the mostly likely scenario.
When they ignored the suggestion and came back with their “boil the ocean” response I responded with the only answer possible to an unanswerable question and pointed them to ground zero for linux knowledge. Install Arch and read everything you don’t understand.
Doing that process will force them to ask specific questions that can be answered.
Of course if you think there is any answer to the question of where someone should go to instantly learn everything then I would love you to post it. I certainly will be bookmarking it.
Yeah no it’s not, I offered some gentle prompts to help him refine his question into something that could be answered. As did several others.
He ignored that and tripled down with “I want to know everything”
That’s not an answerable question.
You have to want to learn before you can be taught. If you can’t listen to the prompt of “ok cool, you’re keen but pick a thing” then there’s no point me trying to help.
Read between the lines, when an expert has ever said “I want to know everything”, OP is clearly a beginner in the subject.
Yeah, to me it reads as someone who recently came from windows, where it can be more or less reasonable to “know everything” about how a user might be aloud to configure and use their OS, and doesn’t yet understand what it means to have a truly open OS
It would help if they had given more info, even if you want to know “everything” you gotta start somewhere, but even then, linux is very multi facetted, and it’s hard to teach someone without knowing what they know now
Are they already using a distro? If not start there, but if so and they’re for example using nabora then information on mint wouldn’t exactly suit them very well
That is to say, it’s a tough situation, I agree that they didn’t handle it the best, but I’m not fully certain how it should have been handled instead
You seem stuck on me supposedly not recognising he was a beginner.
I’d encourage you to re-read the two examples I gave as to what perhaps the questions he might want to ask were. I clearly did recognise that was the mostly likely scenario.
When they ignored the suggestion and came back with their “boil the ocean” response I responded with the only answer possible to an unanswerable question and pointed them to ground zero for linux knowledge. Install Arch and read everything you don’t understand.
Doing that process will force them to ask specific questions that can be answered.
Of course if you think there is any answer to the question of where someone should go to instantly learn everything then I would love you to post it. I certainly will be bookmarking it.