[Mention your Sex if you are comfortable, I want to see the breakdown between the sexes here]
I just tried to skim through Linux User Manual and it was really quite informative and made me think of reading it someday, but I kinda know for a fact that that someday might never come, but it’s truly a shame though.
Now, you, yes you! Have you read the user manual of your Operating system!
[I am wasting a lot of time on here, so I won’t be engaging or enraging y’all, but this is a good convo topic, isn’t it? (try that on a girl), I just wanted to know how many or how few people read UMs]___
Operating systems come with usermanuals? I’ve read a fair bit of the archwiki and manpages if that counts
With all due respect, hell no
I had no idea they had user manuals.
I never even thought about the fact that there might be actual manuals for operating systems
I read most of the DOS 6.0 manual around 1994. This was the era of memory management. Computers had 640k of conventional memory despite my PC having 4M of total ram. Every TSR you could extract out to high or extended memory would have a massive impact on the performance of high demand applications (like all my important applications from Lucas Arts…). I managed to get mouse, soundcard, video, and other drivers loaded and still have 580+K of free conventional memory.
Now I design web scale server architectures capable of handling hundreds of requests per second with five 9’s of uptime (for a few years anyway), and that memory management, from back when I was a tween, is still one of my proudest technological achievements. Thanks DOS manual!
I’m nonbinary and I read the wiki when something breaks or I want to set up something complicated
I’ve never read the manual for an operating system, but I always read the terms of service for websites I sign up for.
Not since the big white book that came with the Commodore PET.
I usually just read the sections relevant to me.
As useful as they are, user manuals are usually not known for their prose
Yes, male. I read everything I could find about my Commodore 128 and how it worked internally. Taught myself assembler.
I’ve read the Gentoo handbook and Sakaki’s old guide, if that counts.
Reading the entire user manual doesn’t seem relevant. IMO it is a reference work; like reading all of Wikipedia or a dictionary. A manual is not a tutorial, and neither are a wiki reference article database. Most users likely expect a more intuitive design where the proper reference materials either make themselves available when needed or are never needed at all.
this is a good convo topic, isn’t it?
not really, speaking as someone whose day job is systems programming
(try that on a girl)
you are such a slimy little incel, lol
I remember reading some old technical manuals for windows 95 way back in the day. Taught me heaps about PnP, bus arbiters and so on.
To be fair, I probably didn’t use that knowledge all that much as PnP and ACPI actually worked really well (I was fortunate enough to only have to deal with DOS as far as himem and whatnot…)
The old GUI style guidelines were fantastic back in the day too - completely unlike the anything-goes approach to modern software development (very different pros and cons, basically), especially in windows-land.
Am male
We have a lot of machines that run on HP unix at work. I read a lot of those manuals as I didn’t want to break anything. It’s very annoying to use coming from modern Linux.
I read some of the 9front documentation and a lot of the Debian administrator’s handbook. I’m weird and just like operating systems though.
I have read all of the Linux Kenel documentation, but am not close to reading every manual for every program.
