I got downvoted into oblivion a few weeks ago for suggesting something similar about car manuals. Iβm glad to see that the sentiment isnβt totally lost. I honestly donβt get why people donβt read the fucking manual.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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This could be me, I started on unix before Linux existed. I was on HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, Solaris1/2, and I did the same thing, went in /usr/bin, did a ls, man all the commands, this is how I learnt unix command, shell, awk, grep, sed, etc.
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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
I once wrote documentation for a fairly complicated bit of control and analysis software for use with test equipment I built for PhD students to use in my department. Towards the end of the docs I added a message that basically said "if you read this, come and see me and I'll buy you some nice food". Needless to say I never had to buy anyone anything.
I've acquired a reputation as the go-to frontend wizard by reading the MaterialUI documentation. Now half my job is randomly getting called on Teams, listening to someone ramble about what crazy ideas they have for their frontend, and pointing them to the MUI implementation that already exists (because there are no new ideas). It's stupid, those docs are modern and well-structured, people just refuse to read them.
Reading the Gentoo Handbook in 2005 taught me more about GNU/Linux than all the tutorials about it I've ever seen
I read the manual before i buy a product, I watch the product reviews, and if I can I watch the repair videos as well.
Big part of my enjoyment from buying things is the work I do upfront. I tend to do the same with any tech project.
Can't find the manual for my girlfriend or her kids.
Part of it is cultural and habit and that is something you can just decide to change. It helps if someone brings it up, like this post, or you might not even think of it.
I bought a $10 power strip / surge protector last week. It was the first time this occurred to me. I pulled out the manual to throw it away, and it was only my experience in writing technical documentation that made me stop and consider actually reading/skimming it.
Maybe I'll change this habit. Maybe I'll start reading these things.
Of course some of them aren't meant to be read. But you can usually tell pretty quickly,
I need them to actually print the FM in order to R it.
From the man manual page: man -t name-of-command | lpr -Pps
This 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/man1 and 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.pdf to create PDFs instead, then scrolling to the end. I neither have a printer nor want to actually print anything.
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i could be reading some fucking manuals right now instead of lemmy...
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
Imagine reading manuals lmao
Username checks out, RTFM makes most people psychotic. Not me though I love the funny words and the voices they speak to me with.