I mean a good troubleshooter will take that info as ruling out the application as long as the version matches. That means next you compare libraries and permissions.

Sound like a skill issue

”Just use Google. It’s literally the top result!”

Oh boy, you ain’t gonna believe how I found this forum thread.

Don't worry guys it's fixed....

That means that can't replicate it, you need to give more details or something.

Trying to do any type of hardware acceleration on waydroid.

Did you tried putting it in the rice on the sun?

What issue are you having?

Probably a skill issue

Fucking noobs. I’m running Solaris on two paper clips and a rubber band.

Solaris still exists?

IT DOES ON MY PAPER CLIPS AND RUBBER BAND!

Me when I'm helping someone troubleshoot their issue and provided them with useful information, and they say I'm not helping them because I didn't solve it for them.

Of course, I'm at the point in my career where the people I'm helping are actual IT people, so they shouldn't really need me to solve it for them no matter how much they hope that would be the result.

When a user comes to me, I understand that the solution is what they need from me. Although I've also been accused of not helping by users who thought I was blaming them by asking questions like, "What were you doing when the problem occurred?"

And that is why I chose Debian as my distro. People aren’t developing with obscure small-time distros in mind.

A few days ago I aked a dev at our subcontractor if this proprietary software would in theory run on windows. Not only "yes", but me running mint on my worklaptop was perfect, because his dev and test environment was debian, so even though the software was built to run on windows, he could easily build a version specifically for me.

Works on my Arch install.

It's okay, so is your machine

Ask them to ship their machine to you.

"well I provide this help on my own time so"

Tells you to Google it again

As a software developer, hearing "it works on my machine" from a subset of users is actually helpful information. It means the problem is environmental, or data related, instead of an explicit code issue. It does narrow things down a bit.

The issue arises when some people treat it as a reason to ignore a problem.

Not always. Race conditions, for example, can have different behavior on different systems.

Ask them to ship their machine to you.

And thus Docker was born!

Edit: Great minds think alike...and so did we!
https://mander.xyz/comment/27610194

Yep, that was what I was referring to.

Works on my Nix flake

nix fixes this

Yeah it's just a problem of generating a diff and having a quick look /j

Best idea ngl

Ok I laughed at this

their machine: washing machine

your machine: coffee machine

Even worse when they instead lecture you on why you shouldn't do that

When that forum is a reddit thread:

"I got it working on my end."

"How did you solve the problem?"

"This message has been script deleted because reddit was stupid salmon truck cantaloupe spezsucks"

"Wow, that fixed it! Thanks! I have no problems with it now at all!"

God I hate this. The fact that I understand why, doesn’t detract from my annoyance with the result. And worse, a large number of Reddit archives have either stagnated or completely died because of the API cutoff, meaning often times that answer is irrecoverable.

Yeah, I saw someone asking "why do you need that app?"

I don't drink coffee, water is good.

I mean, that's basically how I find the root cause of problems that occur in one environment but not the other.

Most recently was when a plasma desktop of any newly created user wouldn't shut down properly, at logout it would hang for about a minute with an error in the logs stating that plasma-plasmashell.service was not responding to a sigterm, and was then ultimately force killed by systemd. On my main desktop, I didn't have this issue.

By meticulously diffing plasma related config files, I found that the culprit was in ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc. Disabling a few system tray applets that I didn't need (and that I indeed had already disabled on my main desktop) fixed the issue.

Don't agree. Often someone's problem can be resolved by just doing something else. That doesn't mean lecturing, but I've seen many, many times where someone was having trouble because they were going about something in the wrong way. Sometimes the most-useful help is to step back and say "you may not want to be doing X, and may want to be doing Y".

The reason why I disagree is that commenters don't always have the full picture. When I already know exactly what I need, receiving many comments, but none helpful, is exhausting. Sometimes it'd be nice to have help on a specific problem without having to convince strangers of every other choice I made in the path.

An example: I've seen people on Reddit ask for help with Linux drivers and be told to buy new hardware entirely. Or ask if a dumbphone supports Whatsapp, and be told to ditch it by Americans who think it's just another social network that you can opt out of.

Useful datapoint.

your machine: washing machine

their machine: coffee machine