Linux requires reading (RTFM)

If you’ve ever done tech support you’ll enjoy this piece of nerd history. In the old days of hacking (before Outlook Express became a worm-factory thanks to non-secured VB script commands) new hackers were given one piece of advice over and over - read as much as you can. It is only the knowledge gained through reading documents about protocols and software that allows you to exploit them.

Since those times there has been a great increase in the number of dumb questions by people who didn’t take the time to do any reading. This has spawned the phrase “RTFM“.

Read The F***ing Manual - that’s the advice given to newbs from the inner circles of programming. AOL tech support will hold hands, heck even other Linux users are often willing to help, but if we ever want to be competent in any field we choose, we’ll have to RTFM.

Case in point: if you don’t read the Gentoo documentation, you’ll probably never have even a stage3 (the non-murderous kind) installed. I barely made it through on the first try and I read the docs several times.