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Comment by TheRealDunkirk | Hacker News Reader

<cough>Bullshit</cough> If you were a Linux user in the mid-90's, then about the only place to get "help" was #linux on EFnet. Collectively, I don't think I've suffered more abuse on the internet than in that forum. And, yes, I'm still bitter. It was NOT a noob-friendly place. The best place -- ever -- to get Linux help was, and will always have been, the Gentoo forums, but that didn't take off till the early 2000's.

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Oh, it’s quite easy to get help there, and has always been.

You just have to be tricky: People will not help you, but as pedantic as they are, they’ll correct mistakes you make.

You go there, and say "I’m disappointed that you can’t even use <device> with Linux" and you’ll get hundreds of answers telling you exactly how to use it.

#linux, the notorious troll channel on EFnet, only provided help when counter-trolled.

The best place -- ever -- to get Linux help was, and will always have been, the Gentoo forums

True! However, obligatory "Gentoo is rice" link: https://fun.irq.dk/funroll-loops.org/

Sven Vermeulen wrote great docs and the community was my first social media. Then that compiz-beryl thing happened and... where is she now I wonder?

I wonder how much of Linux's recent success (I know it's still a tiny fraction) is just because of Google. I can't imagine using Linux if you take away the ability to Google. The fact that usually the results are posts by actual people and not some company stooge makes a world of difference.

You get the same results on DuckDuckGo, etc. there's no search engine lock-in here.

Sorry, doesn't DDG use Google as a back-end, just anonymizing the results?

DDG uses a variety of search engines' responses, including Google's. It has its own crawler as well.

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

No tajen, at least the Wikipedia article for DDG gives no hint that it uses the Google backend. Nor had I ever heard of such a thing.

My experience was clearly different to yours, and it was from 1998 onwards. No need for that kind of behavior.

#linux was a troll channel, so that's a poor example. #e (The Enlightenment Window Manager) had people very eager to help. So did #redhat, #mandrake, #debian #stampede, #slackware, and even #linux-users. All were quite active from '98-2002, before freenode swallowed everything.

source: I got trolled by swedes in #linux before abandoning that wasteland for greener pastures listed above.

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