Posted May 27, 2020
Spectre: With google you have as much chance at finding rubbish that wastes your time as anything useful. Bonus points if you find a forum thread that asks your specific question but the only reply is from someone saying to search google.
For simpler newbie questions, google top pickings usually point to various tutorials which are usually quite valid. For more advanced questions, they point to discussions like in Stackexchange etc. Since many issues can have several causes, people give varying instructions and people comment to them whether it worked or not for them. You just have to use common sense and try which seems most probable to you. Yes some replies are quite useless and the one replying doesn't even understand the question, but usually the most useful answers end up being marked as the Solution (similarly like on the GOG forum you can pick the best answer as the solution).
I have to google for Linux answers constantly due to my work (and sometimes also at home), and I don't really recall ever ending up in some discussion where it is dismissed as "search google". In sites like Stackexchange etc., at worst someone mentioned "this is a duplicate of question X", pointing to that question. Due to how google works, fortunately usually the most useful discussions come at top because those are where people visit more often; useless instructions like "search google" or "figure it out yourself LOL" probably won't get a good google ranking.
Like now I've had to figure out how to set up local repositories for both Ubuntu and Oracle Linux (from which other Ubuntu and Oracle Linux systems can get their updates). I ended up in various tutorials and finally could follow the best ones, and I am finally getting there with working local repositories. Or earlier I had to set up Active Directory integration for some CentOS and Ubuntu servers, and learned quite a bit about realmd etc. by following a few tutorials on the subject. These are stuff that home users don't have to care about.
The only thing I sometimes wish for is that they would maybe elaborate a bit what is the purpose of this and that command, but I guess that is what the manual pages are for. People tend to just quickly answer "run these commands and you are fine", which is understandable. If one wants to learn more what those commands are and do, one can either google for the command and/or check the manual pages. It is better to learn them by doing when you actually need them, rather than someone lecturing you "this command does this and that that", at least I forget that kind of lecturing right away, but remember when I have actually used something myself. It is like having sex: once you have done it at least once, you don't forget anymore what goes where and why.
But as said, sometimes the manual pages can be quite bad and confusing. The good ones show examples for various common situations.
Post edited May 27, 2020 by timppu