this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2026
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Tbf, those are sometimes valid responses, the new user just doesn't realize what they're asking is dumb, and it's exhausting to deal with when a bit of reading would solve the problem or show them what they're asking is impossible.
I used to be a mod on a forum for a fairly popular free program, and we generally treated even that like an information availability problem. Yes, we had an FAQ (and yes, sometimes even still people wouldn't read it), but when there were a ton of similar questions that were all answered in the FAQ, we figured that meant that the FAQ needed a rewrite for better SEO.
Ultra-rare sane person randomly appears on the internet
I'm not even joking, that's literally the best compliment I've received all month. Thank you.
With the poor quality of the search engine results and the fact that information expires I very much disagree with this line of thought. Bit of reading solves the problem when you know what to read and understand what was written. It's very easy to spend hours reading all sorts of things (because you don't know exactly what you're looking for) and then discover half of what you read is now 3-5 years old information and no longer relevant.
I know how easy it is because I spent days troubleshooting why my USB wifi stick wouldn't work. Most of the information I found was from when you needed to manually add the driver and was no longer relevant. What relevant information I did find, nothing matched the issue I was having. In the end I didn't care to bother anyone with a 5 year old wifi dongle because I'd probably run into people like you who'd tell me to RTFM before even bothering to understand the actual problem. Instead I solved the problem by buying a new dongle, one that I knew had been tested and worked. But someone else might have a far more expensive piece of hardware that they can't just replace on a whim.
Let people ask their questions and if it really takes just a bit of reading why not take that 5 minutes to point them to the right place? How many days do they have to waste of their own before they're allowed to ask their stupid question that you could answer in 5 minutes?
This. I had an issue a couple months ago. I posted on the distro's form with a much info as I could provide and some real smart people gave me a ton of help really quickly.
Knowing how to ask and not being abrasive is really helpful.
Lol, posting what you read, tried, error codes, and what's installed and your hardware gives you a very high chance on getting a civil reply. It shows you're trying.
One should always expect new users to ask dumb questions, after all, they are new at this. They haven't yet learned how to speak the language properly to know how to ask the smart questions. Teaching involves answering the same "simple" questions over and over. Somebody did it for you back in the day. And somebody did it for me.
Not being able to teach and guide a newbie is a skill issue on your part just as much as their not knowing how to ask smart questions is.
I'm not really talking about teaching and guiding though.
If you look at the meme, one of the responses is something like "PRs welcome."
I think that's appropriate in certain circumstances.
You are correct, there is nothing wrong with a lack of knowledge or dumb questions. I'm referring more to how they ask their dumb questions.
Some newbies come with hostility, pride, and entitlement, not ignorance.
They request new features, say something sucks bc of blah blah blah, and then get mad at people responding rudely back. But what else should we respond with in this kind of situation? They aren't looking to learn. They are looking to degrade projects, users, and maintainers.
They aren't looking for answers; they're looking to be mad about something and confirm their opinion that "Linux sucks" or some other such bias.
So yeah, when someone comes humbly even with bad assumptions, absolutely correct and guide, but there's no point guiding people who don't actually want guidance, ya know? Pearls before swine
So sometimes these aren't bad responses