Arch wiki is great

Same. That was the tribunal through which you gained Linux maturity in the late 90s. RTFM was not a joke, it was a real mantra. On rare occasion, some guru would take pity and walk you through why your system wouldn’t boot anymore. Newsgroups and IRC were the only way to get help, and when no one would help you, you had to help yourself.

Man pages are also something underrated and tldr is great if you need a quick look at a few basic parameters of a program.

Using Windows is a major part of primary school curriculum in Hong Kong.

Lol i can sing a song about weird ass problems on Linux. Currenty i have the issue that my PC randomly cant get SMART data from single hard drives - i have 5 HDDs (2 on the internal controller, the other 3 in an external casing using USB), 1 SSD (on the internal controller), 1 M.2 NVME drive and an extra PCIE controller with 2 M.2 Sata drives. So the issue is spread across at least 4 different controllers (internal, M.2, PCIE, External per USB) and even different power supplies - i don't even know where to start. Smart data itself is fine for all drives. Started with the last big Fedora update.

I only keep Windows at home because simulator peripherals can be more headache than I'm ready to deal with when I just want to pretend to drive a truck or a tractor for a bit

I mean, they can be set up, but without the vendor software that only runs on Windows, it can be really kludgy

I rawdogged it then took classes and learned like 1% more than I knew before from raw-dogging

Oh, Fedora updates have been known to break stuff occasionally and that honestly blows! I do hope you'll be able to figure it all out in the end because that seems like this is going to cause you a terrible troubleshooter headache. As the issue seems so arbitrary yet it is a major issue, at least the SMART data itself is fine but...Damn that is a crazy issue to have to diagnose.

I have a linux sysop manual from 1999 somewhere. Probably because I was that friend you were always trying to lure away from Windows with Red Hat dual boots and “look Starcraft plays great on Wine!”.

Haven't had the time to really look at it yet, but the logfiles look like single drives become disconnected for fractions of a second while smart data is read - not long enough to cause them to become dismounted. So i can't really rule out some strange hardware issue too... Preliminary web search isnt too forthcoming with possible reasons -.- If i find out what the reason is, i'll update here.

EDIT: THINK I FIXED IT! It seems like the USB cable leading to the external drive case was damaged (i thought of that because i hit my foot on the table and it instantly reported a SMART error) - since i replaced the cable, i did not have any more occurrences. I do NOT have the slightest clue why this would affect reading SMART data from the other drives tho...

Edit 2: Yep, no issues since then. I can only suspect that grabbing smart data when the cable malfunctioned stalled the service, and what hard drive was reported was whereever the internal logic had to wait for the stalled service - pretty strange, but the only way i can explain how devices on a different controller and different PSUs were showing up too.

The beef i have with printed tech literature is tat it ages out pretty quickly.
I prefer man pages and wikis.

There are Linux distributions where you never need to touch the command line unless you're doing advanced stuff.

But if you're a Windows person who wants to be able to use the command line, and you think hacking is cool...

https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/

SSH into a server and find the password to get to the next level. Linux hacking for babies, and you can do it from a Windows computer.

There are Linux distributions where you never need to touch the command line unless you’re doing advanced stuff.

Yeah, this is why I use Mint.

Honestly I learned linux because I needed to turn some pumps on and off...

Made some arduino based controllers, but those were a pain to figure out how to access remotely, so raspberry pi it was, but eventually I needed more horsepower, so debian it was, then ESP-32s were popularized and now I've come full circle with a fleet of ESP-32s reporting to a debian server... eventually I'll get around to understanding some of the hardware interface in the OS a bit more.

All of it by just kind of bumping into problems