I understand its easy to backtrack. I understand that frustration may become so great that patience is lost and then we switch back. I understand that we just “want things to work” and so forget about the true importance of freedom – we forget to cherish it as deeeply as we should – and we switch back.
I understand about “showstopper” bugs or issues which seem insurmountable and frustrating and then we feel there is no alternative but to switch back.
All these are valid reasons. But the reasons to switch to Linux, to choose freedom are even greater. So much greater. We have to make the effort. Over and over.
And I’m here to tell you something: You’re not alone! There is help out there. There’s a huge community of people with the highest intentions, dedicated to freedom and Open Source software, available to help you. You just have to reach out to them. Find them. Connect with them.
Knowing how to connect, where to connect is just as important as everything else. The communities – the ecosystems – are what make free software great. The particulars of free software – the applications, operating system, programs, tools, etc. that we use are always changing – but the communities are always here, will always be here.
Resources & Help With Troubleshooting
Logs are your friend, and above all others is the “syslog” which is at /var/log/syslog. You can either view it with the less command, or you can “tail” it and watch it scroll by as new entries get added.
As I wrote previously, I highly recommend opening a terminal and tailing the syslog just to keep an eye on things and make sure nothing’s going crazy. I wrote about a serious bug with KDEConnect. Before I knew that it was causing problems I just knew that my system was experiencing a critical problem which completely stopped me from being able to use it.
The difference between not knowing the source of a problem and knowing is everything. The two things you can do is look in syslog or possibly other logs to find any error messages, and then use a search engine.
There’s a bit of an art to how to search for things you see in a log file. You want messages about errors, but you obviously don’t want to search for strings of text that are unique to your situation like perhaps your computer’s name or entry dates in the log file. Try to look at error messages in logs and what seems like the most reasonable text related to some component. You may be surprised what you find.
I’ve often tried more general searches for things that were having problems only to find lots of forum posts that basically went nowhere and had a lot of uninformed responses. But then if you find an exact phrase relating to some detailed component in an error log message you can sometimes hit exactly on a forum post – usually in a bug-tracking system – that deals with the issue directly.
This – log file error messages and using a search engine – is probably the most powerful thing you can do because it can take you directly to information related to the source of a problem.
Next to that, you can search on forums. You can try searches with specific information about a problem and hope that there exists an answer.
You can also go to online chat forums where a lot of developers and knowledgeable people hang out and ask questions.
Two important chat networks are freenode and oftc. A really good IRC client is Hexchat which I know exists for Linux and Windows. When you connnect to either of these networks you can open a list of channels and search for specific channels. There are a lot of channels but some of the major ones are ones like #ubuntu.
Finally, there are also bug-tracking systems. Ubuntu and KDE both have their own bug-tracking systems where you can search for bugs and report them. If you are serious about using Linux you may want to consider getting accounts with these and other bug-tracking systems and get more involved. Instead of just being helpless when you experience a problem, you can start to become part of the solution, and provide vital feedback to developers who are working to make free software the best possible.
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