• Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus
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    1 day ago

    Yeah, i had a similar experience. I was messing around with a small Media Center/NAS hybrid running Debian, and it really, really wasn’t happy with the integrated GPU of the AMD A4 i was using, causing instability and tons of graphical glitches especially in video playback, which were not acceptable on a potential media center. My attempts to get help from the community as a linux noob that did not even have enough knowledge to know what commands i could use to get relevant information to add to my cry for help got me a lot of harsh replies before someone was nice enough two days later to help me out. We got it fixed together after a few rounds of replies, but my first impression was not very good.

    Nowadays there are so many online resources available, and support boards often have basic information available about what information should be attached and HOW TO GET IT, which reduces friction a lot, and also makes the community a lot more accessible for new users.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      1 day ago

      causing instability and tons of graphical glitches especially in video playback

      Flashbacks to me struggling to get the fglrx drivers working.

      If you never got to experience the “joy” of that… There was a time long ago when getting graphics acceleration working with ATI/AMD GPUs on Linux needed proprietary drivers. It was a struggle, significantly worse than dealing with the Nvidia drivers today. Things improved so much when AMD released and upstreamed their modern open-source driver, around 10 years ago now.

      • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus
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        1 day ago

        Yep, that was exactly the case back then, and getting the drivers to work was an awful experience, especially since they really didn’t play nice with the iGPU. I for sure was way out of my depth at that time, with just enough linux experience to know that instead of “dir” i have to use “ls”.

        • tal@lemmy.today
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          19 hours ago

          I’m pretty sure that most Linux environments that I’ve been in have had dir for a long time.

          checks

          Okay, I’m on my phone right now, so Termux does, and it’s not an alias. The manpages say that it’s part of GNU coreutils, so it’s probably like that on all the distros.

          checks the git mirror

          https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commits/master/man/dir.x

          The dir manpage file was added to GNU coreutils in 1998. Could be that it even predated that—I didn’t go see whether the repository layout changed at that point. But it’s at least that old.

          • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus
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            17 hours ago

            Even that was not known to me at that point. most of my knowledge was years old at this point, and i do not want to say that what i knew at that point was even remotely actual.