 I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be a good Linux user. And I think that of all the qualities that it would take to be a good Linux user to be a successful Linux user, the most important one is that you're not intellectually lazy. And what I mean by that is most successful Linux users are willing to learn new things. And if you're not willing to learn new things, you're not going to be a successful Linux user. It really comes down to being as simple as that. Linux is not for someone who's not interested in being a learner. When you first install Linux, you're going to have things go wrong. And that problem isn't going to go away. You're going to continue to find problems on Linux for as long as you use Linux. It's just the nature of Linux. It's the nature of Windows too, but people don't support their own Windows PCs. They get support from the PC manufacturer. So when you have something wrong with Windows, you call Microsoft, or you call IBM, or you call whoever you call, I don't even know. You don't do your own support on Windows. Somebody else supports you. On Linux, you're very much your own support system. When something goes wrong, it's on you to get up off your metaphorical ass and go to Google or go to .go and search out the solution to your problem. That's not something that happens on Windows. And if you want to be a successful Linux user, you have to be willing to do that. You have to be willing to search out a solution to your problem. You have to be willing to learn new things and how to solve things when they go wrong. You have to learn how to find different programs that you have to use on Linux because certain things aren't available on Linux that are available on Windows. If you're not willing to do those things, your experience on Linux is going to be terrible. What got me into this was that Luke Smith did a video the other day and basically the whole 10 minutes of it was him wandering around in his backyard as he's known to do and talking about an experience he had with some random other person who installed Manjaro and had a bad experience. And I'm not saying that that person didn't have a bad experience with Manjaro. It's possible that that person did. The problems that Luke Smith was naming off were all stupid problems and every single one of them was very easy to find a solution for on the internet by googling it. And maybe this person wasn't intellectually stimulated enough to actually go through and search out those solutions other than calling Luke Smith or whatever, you know, if that's the thing that you can do. Does Luke Smith have his own hotline or something? I don't know. Maybe it's possible. I don't know all the details of that situation, frankly, don't care. But from what I've, you know, saw, it was more case of that person just shouldn't be using Linux. And I'm not calling that person stupid, you know, you can't call people stupid. There are plenty of stupid people who use Linux just fine. We can, I mean, hello, right here, I mean, it's perfectly fine to be an idiot and be a Linux user. But my point is, is that when you use Linux, you have to be willing to learn new things and to admit when you don't know things. You can't go about using Linux in a passive fashion. It just doesn't work in this, you have someone else completely supporting you. So like if you install Linux on someone else's computer, and they're not interested in knowing and learning about Linux and finding their own problems. You are the support that in that, in that scenario. This has nothing to do with that person. And that's a fine scenario to be in, you know, I have family members, I've installed Linux on their computer before, and you know, I'm that support person. And we can't count that person as a true Linux user, because they're never going to experience what it means to be a Linux user, which is to have problems and solve them and learn new things. They're just a computer user, you know. So the bottom line is that if you're going to be a true Linux user, and you're going to be a successful Linux user, you have to be willing to learn new things. You have to be willing to face problems on your own, and then find solutions virtually on your own, because that's just the way Linux works. Now that doesn't mean that you can't find help in the Linux community. That's not true. There are tons of sources of existing help and new help. So if you need to, things like the ArchWiki, the Debian wiki, the Ubuntu wiki, these are great sources of documentation, but all of these distros also have vast communities. And for the most part, they're willing to help new users. They can be a bit prickly from time to time. But for the most part, new users get the help they want, as long as that help is sought out. If you're a Windows user, you're not used to seeking out help from a community, because there's not a Windows community. Not really. There's a community, or there's a, there's a Windows conglomerate, I guess is the word you would use, and when you want support from the Windows conglomerate, you call Microsoft, or you get on the Microsoft forums, whatever they have, I don't even know. It's not community driven. So you're not used to this idea of going to Reddit or a Telegram group to get support. And that's the way it is in Linux. It's completely different. And when I'm talking about, in order to be a good Linux user, you have to be able to be willing to seek that stuff out. I'm talking about when you make a transition from Windows to Linux, to being able to transition from one support structure, which is basically relying on someone else to support you, to being completely on your own in terms of support, seeking things out and such, like that. So I think that the reason why Linux has such a hard time supporting new users is because we tend to have a lot of people who can't make that transition from one support structure to another. Even though those people have jumped the hurdle of actually seeking out help, we oftentimes treat those people as if they're still Windows users and they're treating the Linux community as Microsoft support. And that's something that the Linux community kind of has to get passed. But it's going to be really hard because there still are a lot of people who treat the Linux community like we are technical support. And we're not, you know, the relationship between Noob and the Linux community has to go both ways. And that's what makes the Linux community great. Like you can get involved, even if you're a brand new user, you know, nothing about coding, design, any of that stuff, you know, you can be involved just by getting into the forums and helping people as you go along. Because you've experienced Linux as you go along. And there are people behind you that are going through the same things you went through. That's how you get involved. And it's a process that every Linux user goes through. That's how would you have to do in order to be a successful Linux user? You can't, like I said before, you can't be passive and use Linux. It's just not possible because your experience on Linux when you first install it is going to include problems. It just is. And that experience isn't going to go away. You're going to have problems for ever on Linux. It's just the nature of Linux. Things go wrong all the time. Even if you're using a stable distro, you're going to experience an update that goes wrong. You're going to experience an app that crashes, you know, because software has bugs. It happens, you know. And your experience when you first use Linux is going to be very, it's going to kind of like training for the rest of your Linux experience because how you start on Linux is going to be how you continue. And if you're not willing to put forth the effort, really that's the bottom line is that Linux requires effort. And if you're not willing to put that effort in, don't use Linux. Use Windows because Windows requires no effort. That's the difference between Linux and Windows. One requires effort and curiosity and intellectual stimulation. And Windows is just a tool, like a hammer. And the only rule against, you know, for using the hammer is that you don't hit yourself in the foot. That's the only rule. You know, and when the hammer breaks, you go buy a new hammer on Linux. When something breaks, you have a support system in place if as long as you're willing to seek it out, that can help you fix your hammer. So that metaphor went completely sideways, I'm sure. Anyways, that's it for this video. If you want to get in contact with me, you can do so at the Linux Cast on Twitter. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linux Cast. Before I go, I'd like to take one moment to thank my current patrons, Devon Chris, East Coast Webgent, who is fun to Marcus, Megalyn, Donnie Sven, Jackson, Knife and Tool, Mitchell, Mr. Fox, Arts, and American Camp. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.