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On, Good Advice Delivered Poorly

June 14, 2026

I recently finished watching the conclusion of Linus Tech Tips's second Linux challenge. Unsurprisingly, much of the series focused on criticizing the overly-aggressive online Linux community. This is by no means a new criticism, but it did become a very central theme of the series. All three of the challenge's participants for example, admitted to relying in LLM's for some amount of Linux trouble-shooting, specifically to avoid having to sift through forums or Reddit posts where they might run into the stereotypical linux-brained neck beard who silently shouts things like: "RTFM!"

To be clear from the start: I'm not here to make the case that the online Linux community in places like Reddit or StackOverflow is some perfect utopia, which is only toxic to Windows snowflakes who just need to toughen up if they're going to us the world's greatest OS. It makes all the sense in the world that a user-base that makes up roughly 3% of desktop market-share world wide, would be full of very opinionated users. MacOS itself has just over 10% of desktop market share as of May of 2026, and that community is also known for its own collection of contrarian and sycophantic members. However, I do think that this online conversation is a great lens by which to talk about the best skill I've ever developed, and one that I think everyone could benefit from: an ability to take good advice, even when it's delivered in the worst possible way.

In May of 2020 I decided to catalog my own attempt to switch to Linux full-time. I had spent the last few months learning how to control my Mac from the command line, and falling in love with CLI apps like Vim. For the first time, I thought it might be advantageous for me to abandon the OSX set-up I had come to love. I made the somewhat ill-advised decision to jump straight from a proprietary child-proof OS, straight to good ol' Arch Linux. In a two-part video appropriately titled: "A Clueless Arch Linux Install Guide" I successfully managed to get an Arch install to boot, only to read the comments below the video and realize I'd made a long list of pretty critical errors in the install process. I immediately wiped the hard drive and started over again. I say this was an ill-advised decision however, only because there wasn't anyone advising me to do it. Nearly every online listicle or thread in 2020, and in 2026 advises that new users wade into the Linux waters with something like Linux Mint or Pop!_OS rather than jumping in head first with Arch.

The truth however, is that jumping straight to Arch Linux was the best decision I could have made, specifically because I did it in such a public way. Over the next year I uploaded all manner of clueless Linux guides. I focused on everything from setting up Proton and its various forks, to hacking on X11 window mangers, to creating miscellaneous bash scripts and hyper-niche ricing projects on my new Linux install. I learned an insane amount about Linux, and computing in general, because I thrust myself into the deep-end with tools that I barely knew how to use. But also, specifically because of the Reddit-posters and YouTube comment dweller's that everyone else seemed so eager to punch down on. All the way back in 2020 (it feels as if I might as well be talking about 1920), the option wasn't available to simply use an AI agent or LLM if I found the Reddit threads or YouTube comments to be rude. If I wanted to trouble-shoot a problem, or learn how to do something new on my system I had to dive head first into the very same waters that everyone complained so much about having to occasionally dip their toes into.

Part of my position here has nothing to do with the "Linux community" itself. I have worked more than a few jobs in construction, law enforcement, retail and even a restaurant job or two when I was younger. Across all of these industries, it's very rare to have anyone sit a new employee down and give them nice and gentle instructions for doing their job well. In retail or the restaurant industry, employees learn what not to do by getting yelled at by a disgusting Karen who has nothing better to do. In construction it's a foreman or GC doing basically the same thing. During my time as a prison guard, I was equally likely to be cursed at by the inmates I was in charge of and the officers worked with. But in all of these cases, I eventually realized that most people didn't get upset for no reason whatsoever. No matter how unnecessary or ridiculous an outburst might have been, it was pretty rare that there wasn't something I could trace the anger that was being directed at me back to. It didn't take me long to learn that my best move, if I wanted to be better at my job, or just wanted to avoid having to deal with unsavory people any longer than was absolutely necessary, was to find a way to accept the...