Solving problems

Don’t worry if you think something’s not right with a particular Linux distribution. You’re entitled to a full refund after all. Only kidding. In 2012 even Linus himself raged at OpenSUSE developers when he discovered that adding a printer (on his daughter’s laptop) required the root password. Sometimes there are reasons why things are that way (in 2012 there wasn’t the notion of a privileged local user; it’s handled by systemd these days), sometimes it’s a genuine bug, and sometimes you’re just using it wrong.

These days Linus is generally calmer (except perhaps on the subject of L1D cache flushing), and his recently purchased development machine (a Threadripper 3970X which you can read all about on ZDNet at www.zdnet.com/ article/look-whats-inside-linus-torvaldslatest-linux-development-pc) runs Fedora 32. And we’ll talk about that later on. We’ll also see how elementary OS is tackling unnecessary password requests over the page.

There are plenty of ways to get help with Linux, and thanks to its popularity it’s highly likely someone has encountered your issue before you did. So your first act should be to always be to Google your problem. Beyond that, head to your distro’s forums and search there. If you still feel like you’ve hit a new issue then describe it as best you can, and check the forum’s guidelines about how to get and attach appropriate log files and hardware information. Help the community help you.