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This is my super power. Easiest way to look like the smartest person in the room every once in a while.
now people just “ask GPT”… “I asked chatGPT”.
my answer is “dude, GPT just copypasted from the fucking manual so you don’t have to read. congrats, you didn’t learn a fucking thing.”
it’s depressing
linuxlunatics is almost a genre of its own
devdocs.io is beloved.
I don’t Linux (yet), but I do work in Audio Production. I LIVE for good manuals. I always read them, and because of that, I’m always working from a starting line of intelligence with new gear. I keep manuals in pdf format on my computer in like borderline autistic order. RTFM is the best piece of advice anyone can have, ever.
I too, work in audio production, and keep a meticulously organized folder of manuals. I love products that still ship with a physical printed manual, especially the spiral bound ones.
I need them to actually print the FM in order to R it.
From the man manual page:
man -t name-of-command | lpr -PpsThis dumps the manual page, along with relevant formatting, to the default Postscript-capable printer attached to the system.
There are ways to print all manual pages this way, but you’re gonna need a lot of paper. Bash’s manual page is getting towards 100 pages* and ffmpeg’s runs to nearly 700.
By comparing compressed sizes in
/usr/share/man/man1and the equivalent page count of those two commands, I reckon my system’s full complement of manuals would be on the order of 35- to 40,000 pages.* Figures obtained by using
man -t name-of-command | ps2pdf - outputname.pdfto create PDFs instead, then scrolling to the end. I neither have a printer nor want to actually print anything.deleted by creator
It must be nice to be able to read and recall.
mankier saved my ass more times than i’m willing to admit on Barebones distros that came with no man. Especially with the command examples
Username checks out, RTFM makes most people psychotic. Not me though I love the funny words and the voices they speak to me with.
Video games trained millennials to do this. NES, Sega, SNES, even Atari games very often told you real shit in the manual. They were written to be read and contain training material. There were no tutorials other than reading and trail and error.
If I ever make a game I’m including at least 7 pieces of deep lore in the manual and one clue that you would only figure out by rtfm
Back in the day, DRM was handled like this. I had an indy 500 game where the manual contained a bunch of hiatory of the sport and in order to launch the game, you had to answer indy 500 history trivia questions.
Other games had a symbol alphabet (or some other mapping between images and information it could put on the screen) where the key was only contained in the manual (or on a piece of paper that came with the game).
King’s Quest VI had riddles that needed to be answered in a symbol alphabet. You could play the game without doing this but you couldn’t beat it.
A mickey mouse game had a paper that was dark brown with black ink (so photocopiers would fail to copy it) with Mickey in various poses and you had to find the number for the one shown on screen to play.
My childhood family computer had the old D&D games from the gold box where you had a wheel you had to pull out and align it every single time you played to get the code symbol to put in in order to play the game.
In retrospect, that was kind of cool, even if it’s diabolical.
I remember Street Fighter II asked for page x, paragraph y word z. Once it even pointed to the German section of the manual where the word “mitten” was used. I found that clever. You can’t just copy the English part.
Also, Leisure Suit Larry did something similar, and they sold more copies of the manual than they sold of the game.
And in a matter of a few hours a single guy will have read the manual, figured out the clue and put it on a wiki or a Reddit post so that none of your other players have to rtfm
Every manual is personalized
Personalized, matched to that specific instance of the game, and the clue gets the Star Tropics treatment but with paper that dissolves after 60 seconds.
I mean, how else were you ever going to foodie that out?
Really, the manuals where they made it fun at the best.
I think it also functioned as an anti piracy measure
If someone in the 80s or 90s was going to the trouble of copying roms onto new boards and making plastic enclosures, then photocopying a little booklet really isn’t that much of a heavy lift.
Im really sad that there are no longer manuals in games, and half the time or more it seems nothing has or comes with manuals anymore
Tunic is rtfm the game
Or you miss something from the one time tutorial and go through a ton of the game not knowing you can do a certain thing. Then you watch some YouTube video where someone does that thing and you’re like FUCK I COULD HAVE BEEN DOING THAT ALL ALONG!
It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Manuals were needed because they contained information that was missing from the games. Since that time, game design principles have evolved, and most of what used to be in game manuals was eventually included in the games themselves in a semi-diegetic manner. For example, the Codex in Mass Effect, or the books in various Larian games.
Player training is another aspect that has evolved beyond needing a written summary. Half-Life 2 is an excellent example. The player’s attention is drawn to a demonstration of a mechanic, then they are gated until they solve a simple puzzle involving that mechanic, then a more complex puzzle involving previously learned mechanics. For example: the player sees an energy ball in a socket activating a bridge; then the player has to launch an energy ball into an empty socket; then the player has to bounce an energy ball off a wall to reach an empty socket. Other great examples are Soul Reaver 1, Dishonored, and obviously, Portal.
I’m not against the idea of supplementary printed material, as long as it remains supplementary. If printed material is required* to make a game playable, then it’s a failure of game design.
* obviously excludes the other extreme end of the spectrum where reading printed material is an integral part of the gameplay, like various Zachtronics games.
You might look into some Zachtronics games. Both ExaPunks and Shenzhen I/O require their paper manual counterparts to be played.
Also TIS-100, the one no one talks about since Shenzhen I/O came out. :(
TIS-100 Sits unfinished in my library as one of the most esoteric and difficult puzzle games I’ve ever played. It breaks my mind thinking about it.
Psh. As a kid in a post-soviet country I hadn’t seen a game manual up until PS3 days. Every single cartridge and disc sold there was just that. Best case scenario in a flimsy plastic case that would disintegrate in a couple of years. Had to rawdog the shit out of those games. Pure trial and error and perseverance.
Stuck? Try every possible button combination in every location that makes any sense.For example, couldn’t finish Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster’s Hidden Treasure on Mega Drive (Genesis) because I didn’t know you can jump off walls. Finished it earlier this year though 🙃
Not to brag, but my brother and I passed the garage test mission in Driver (PS1) as kids. Now that I think about it, I should put it on my resume.
Which also proves the point that a manual isn’t preventing anything.
I’m not sure I understand. What point?
Sorry, someone else had suggested that a manual that was necessary to knowing how the game works was some sort of way to try and prevent piracy. Which is just not sensible. Pirates gonna pirate.
They are right, it was used for that. Sometimes some key information for progress would be in the manual or on the box. Luckily it wasn’t super popular on consoles, due to the notion that it wasn’t as easy to pirate on consoles as it was on home computers, where you could just copy the floppy/CD.
I think that was really more in the Atari days, right? Some of them have technical steps like jump switches.
I’m aware of some DOS games that did it. For example 1989 Prince of Persia had to enter the exact character (page, line, word) from the manual.
On PS1 you’d probably never complete Metal Gear Solid (1998), cause you need to call somebody on the codec, but the frequency was on the box cover.
Psh. As a kid in a post-soviet country I hadn’t seen a game manual up until PS3 days.
we were lucky if we or family members in the house could speak enough english to know what the fuck was even on screen.
When you were partying
I read the fucking manual.
When you were having premarital sex
I mastered reading the fucking manual.
While you wasted your days at the gym in pursuit of vanity
I cultivated READ THE FUCKING MANUAL.
And now that the world is on fire and the barbarians are at the gate you have the audacity to come to me for help?
Can’t have friends asking you for help if you don’t have friends.
You RTFM to have a sense of superiority over those that don’t
I RTFM to avoid having to talk to another person
We are not the same
My internet is broken. Can you have a look?
Does your manual contain a chapter about barbarian invasions?
Whose doesn’t?
Honestly, who has the time? I could read the manual or I could enjoy my life instead.
That’s your choice, but you don’t get to then complain about the prices set by the people who read the manual for you so that you could enjoy your life instead. You either pay them or pay yourself.
Or, in case of Linux, you just suffer because the manpages are so god damn useless to average users.
Is it a reading comprehension thing? Man pages are so ridiculously useful. Do people just see a lot of text and refuse to even try?
It’s hard to imagine them being more clear.
I mean, – in college – the running joke in my CS department was to try reading the man page even though it would likely be impenetrable.
I think the issue is that they’re written from the perspective of someone in deep knowledge of the entire system already rather than someone who might be using it for the first time and trying to figure out their was around.
Let’s take the first fragment of the first sentence of
ls’s page: “For each operand that names a file of a type other than directory[…].”Well, what’s a directory? Most people use the term folder; that could arguably not be fair as the term directory came first so let’s ignore that criticism.
What’s an operand in this scenario? While an accurate term, not exactly the most familiar (and certainly not helpful to, say, my partner who, due to dyscalculia, is almost certainly not to be familiar as it’s most often used in math). But we crack open a dictionary and find it’s the bit manipulated by an operator.
So…the text we give
ls? Does that include values we give to the flags (not that I’d know what those are, yet, or what they do). And, of course, the SYNOPSIS describes that text we give as “file” while the very next sentence lets us know that operands can also be directories (mostly, most people think of files and directories as different things) so there’s already an overt disconnect between the verbage, description, and examples, disallowing any pattern matching of my brain to quickly piece concepts together.All of which will probably be hard for me to quickly comprehend as I’m expecting a description of a thing to start with what the thing is rather than immediately describing a small facet of the thing.
Like…I’d argue it’s poorly written, on it’s own face, but it’s utterly bewildering for someone who isn’t even entirely certain what all the pieces of the new world they’re exploring are, yet, and is trying to piece things together via concept clues.
This. Terminology, unknown concepts (some simply expected to be known, such as standard parameter syntax) and a lack of simple examples to understand all the abstract explanations with (like the way ‘tealdeer’ presents it) make manpages utterly useless to anyone but powerusers with lots of time and an interest in the topic.
Someone saying “RTFM” unironically in regards to Linux is basically a red flag for new users at this point. Not because reading manuals was bad, but because the manuals provided are simply awful. They’re developer- and expert-friendly, not user-friendly.
Or you just use Google
I got downvoted into oblivion a few weeks ago for suggesting something similar about car manuals. I’m glad to see that the sentiment isn’t totally lost. I honestly don’t get why people don’t read the fucking manual.
I could jump in any car my family has owned, starting with great-grandad’s push-button transmission up to 2005 and instantly intuit the controls and go. You’d need the manual later for maintenance, but you could drive just fine. Now, you gotta read the manual.
I read every manual, but I’m skimming and skipping, looking for what I don’t know. Maybe people have opened enough manuals that spent the first 4 pages, “Don’t do stupid shit.” and gave up.
Cause it takes time and effort. Most people just pay someone else to read the manual.
How is paying somebody else to read the manual going to help you operate the cruise control while going down the interstate at 85MPH?
Yeah sure, unless the manual reads like a white paper from the 80s… Ya know like every man page ever
Learn fucking attention span?
cries in ADHD
Its the damn truth. Either rtfm which is the easy way since your predecesors made it for you or tinker with shit by trial and error untill you figure it out all on your own. Otherwise you are just lazy.
