Just giggled as my last meme mentioned trouble with displays and appropriately, a large chunk of the replies were “well MY displays work just fine!” (And charmingly, many were thoughts of things to check, other distros etc. It’s a very kind community, though that may also be the fediverse.)
I posted in official support channels for my flavor of Fedora not having functioning Windows EXE thumbnails, despite having evidence of it working out-of-the-box for other people. It got two replies, “Lol, find another distro if you don’t like it,” and “Did you install (package that comes pre-installed)?”
In truth, this is how almost every issue I’ve had with Linux has gone, which is likely why I’ve had three false starts and gone through six different distros before deciding to stick with this one that is only mildly broken.
I’d love to know what it is about help threads that attracts people who don’t believe in helping.
My theory is they want to help and believe themselves capable but when someone asks a question that they don’t know the answer to, they either have to admit to themselves that they don’t know and aren’t as capable as they thought or they have to find a way to blame the person asking for help. Mentally the path of least resistance is to just blame the user and it’s also not exactly false to say it’s the help seekers fault, it’s just a bit of a dick move and unhelpful.
Here you go: https://github.com/jlu5/icoextract
Looks like it’s got AUR and apt
Yep, know about that. Set it up back when I tried a few Debian-based distros with Gnome. I’m using Plasma with Dolphin as my file manager now, which has its own thumbnailer that relies on icoutils. I’ve got the whole thing set up and enabled, it just… doesn’t work.
My experience has been finding a 5 step solution to a problem, with step 3 not working properly and requiring several hours of effort to find a workaround, finding an entirely different solution elsewhere (that also doesn’t work), then discovering there’s been a flatpack the entire time.
Still have bazzite on my shitty 10 year old laptop because it cannot possibly run windows at this point, but I don’t think I’d daily drive it.
Flatpak is a godsend when you don’t want to manage a mess.
I find the best way to get help is to find a good source of documentation, rather than asking questions directly. ArchWiki is great, UbuntuWiki is not bad. There are lots of blogs out there with people writing guides for how to solve issues that they’ve had, and they’re usually really good (but this relies on search engines finding these results).
I find that it depends on how niche the distro is.
Somewhat obviously, niche distros don’t have as many resources out there to begin with.
This also means you’re unlikely to be told to research yourself.
But users of niche distros also made a conscious choice to be on that specific distro and therefore tend to be more enthusiastic. Both, about helping others who made the same choice, but also about fixing problems or at least documenting a workaround for the distro that they plan to stay on for the foreseeable future.
Well, and due to survivorship bias, folks on niche distros tend to also be Linux experts, who can solve virtually any problem, given enough motivation.
If you find a kind soul, they will walk you through hell and back, which is worth so much more than any documentation in the world.