A Tribute to the experts who give advice.

[catchpole]

As a noob I have a dilemma.

The experts who give advice on the forum very kindly give their time to us noobies and we very much appreciate it.

I don't want to waste any of their time by letting them fix my problem without any effort from me.
Therefore I try to fix things myself and can get into a mess by doing so.
This creates extra work for them and I don't want to create that extra work.

As I get guidance on a problem there comes a time when I think I can carry on from there and arrive at a solution.
Sometime this works, sometimes not.

Do I try to fix things for myself when I'm halfway through a solution which can end up giving extra work to the experts?
Or do I follow the instructions precisely and await the outcome?

We learn more by trying and learning from our mistakes but can create the extra work for others by following this path.
Its not a nice feeling having to ask someone to clear up a mess that I've created.
Our path to "Competent user" is a long drag and our knowledge is gained in areas where we have problems but lacking in other areas.
As we get more patches of knowledge and the patches get bigger, they will eventually begin to join up.
This process could not happen without the freely given help of the experts.

I think I can safely say to all the experts from all noobies:

THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR ALL YOUR TIME, EFFORT, AND PATIENCE.
_________________
Noob
With experience of Mint and trying to learn more by intalling Gentoo
Motherboard = MS-7211- MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO., LTD
CPU = Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.80GHz version: 15.4.9
Memory = 2GB

[tclover]

Funny to read it stated like this. Actually the "noobness" never go away definitely... ever. It's just a question of *enough* learning, experiencing and understanding what one is using as an OS to get the *autonomous* state. And so, get things done/be your way. Interesting process to say the least. After all, there would be always something to learn with a living community/OS. That *expert* status is actually tricky because many tends to request the (natural) *right* to be... always *right* all the time which is far from the truth. Well, there are many things to be learned and a single life couldn't be possibly be enough to reclaim that *Expert* status. And many times, the "noob" view of things shed some light to the so called *expert*. So, this is really *just* the living of a community. Nothing more, nothing less.
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home/:mkinitramfs-ll/:supervision/:e-gtk-theme/:overlay/

[Fitzcarraldo]

For what it's worth, my advice would be to try and fix things yourself before appealing for help on the forums. Obviously you need to do a lot of searching and reading on the Web to see if you can find the cause of your problem but, in my experience, 90 per cent of my problems are soluble simply by googling (well, DuckDuckGo'ing!). Only appeal for help if you have really exhausted all avenues. In my opinion you will learn a lot more by adopting that approach, even though it takes you more time and may result in a breakage. Furthermore, sometimes by breaking something you learn too.

But I would add another piece of advice. Try and solve other people's problems sometimes. You may not necessarily post in their thread, but by investigating their problem -- which might become your problem in future* -- you also learn something. It's time consuming but I have quite often done this and learned something useful along the way.

* I write from experience!
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Clevo W230SS: amd64, VIDEO_CARDS="intel modesetting nvidia".
Compal NBLB2: ~amd64, xf86-video-ati. Dual boot Win 7 Pro 64-bit.
OpenRC udev elogind & KDE on both.
Fitzcarraldo's blog

[NeddySeagoon]

catchpole,

You learn more from fixing stuff when it breaks that you ever will from following instructions.

Your mix and match - asking and doing stuff for yourself is a good combination.
That of itself does not make more work for your helpers. Its doing stuff for yourself and not telling your helpers what you did that makes more work.

Personally, I try to teach fishing, rather than hand out fish. It helps others become more confident and more self suffcient.

Everyone is somebody elses expert.
If you know you can help - post a response.
If you are not 100% sure, check before you post. you will learn something too. You may not apply it yourself right away but it will stick in your mind for when you do need it.
You don't even need a complete answer. Your hint, combined wint the user doing stuff for themselves may be enough. Thats where we came in.

If you do fix something after a mix of pointers from the forum and self hep, please complete the thread by saying what you did.
That will help those with less confidence who come after you.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.