Searching gives me the impression there’s a million ways to solve the same problem on Linux, and I find myself profiling answers into about four categories at a glance:
- Succinct: one or two-liner, a single config file, or just a few clicks
- Long-winded song-and-dance: Full train of thought interspersed between various commands and logs, several config files (some of which don’t already exist), or installing an obscure package that is no longer maintained
- Specific to a desktop environment or version I don’t have
- Just looks wrong
I’ll usually just take solutions from the first category, which almost always works, save for differences between updates and versions. Solutions in the second category also seem to end with a 50% chance of the OP unable to solve the problem. If I’m desperate, I’ll try the second one, but it often ends up not working, eventually leading me to come up with a much cleaner solution of my own.
Curious if anyone else does this too and if those one-liners are really better solutions or if it’s just confirmation bias.
I find i to look on forums for solutions less and less anyway. Once you’ve been using a distro long enough unless your trying to do something you’ve never done before it’s usually pretty simple to know what’s wrong, and fix it. Because you’ll get the same things popping up over and over again.
I also like to keep like a little doc of fixes I’ve done on each computer so that if a year later i need to do a version upgrade or reinstall i can look back to it, and see what i did last time if i get repeat issues. Especially useful on stuff like laptops where you’ll have really specific hardware issues that reappear years later, and normally take hours and hours of trying to figure out what is broken.