Definitely not wrong. As someone who works nowhere near the tech sector who has attempted to dabble in Linux, that initial learning curve is just too high. I don’t have the time to dedicate to that, I have other interests in my life
Not even Linux, the READMEs of a lot of code repositories are sometimes made for people who already know what it is, but seem alien to anyone just trying to understand “does this codebase help with my use-case?”
My experience is the opposite. Open a project’s website, it’s full of marketing talk where I can’t find what the project does in a minute or several minutes. Open Github instead, the readme starts with “this thing is for doing X with Y under Z circumstances”. These days I mostly skip sites and go straight to Github.
I always go to the primary source as first port of contact, but sometimes it’s not clear what the code does.
For example, I need a JTAG adapter on my ESP32 via USB that I can program my laptop through the device.
Does this 10-starred seemingly perfect repo do what I want[1]?
https://github.com/emard/esp32s3-jtag
No, the ESP32 is only the JTAG host, you do not actually get access to the pins, so if you want to do custom timings you will not be in luck. This is not clear. I have seen dozens more like this. ↩︎
Ah, well, afaict this is a rather more specialized case. Here, I’m a complete noob because I don’t do electronics, so I have no idea what a JTAG is or how I could use this. An intermediate scenario would be if you found their site in search, and it said “have you ever wished to connect one thing to another thing?” instead of the JTAGs and stuff. This case, when you basically know what it supposedly does but have to pore over documentation or code to figure out details, is a more involved one, and of course, I’ve ran into such stuff aplenty too.
(Out of curiosity, would you be able to beat that code with a C++ stick (or whatever) yourself until it did what you wanted?)
oh okay good to know I’m at least not alone in this experience
Edit: To do it myself, I’d have to implement the JTAG protocol on the GPIO’s directly using arduino or esp libraries, which is not something I would relish doing. Perhaps in MicroPython, but that has limited libraries and it would be a lot of trial and error… and ultimately, I just want to run a JTAG debugger on an ARM core I found, not re-invent a new JTAG debugger
why are you going to github to compile code if you’re not even comfortable with regular day to day linux use yet? you skipped so many steps, no wonder it’s offputting.
The beauty of it is that once you work out how Linux and self hosting works, you won’t have time for anything else. So the cliff face learning curve is to dissuade the filthy casuals.
For what it’s worth, Linux mint was pretty simple to install. I think Linux folks tend to sneer at it because it just works without the crazy headaches and hassles we associate with Linux.
(I finally tried Mint rather than pay for windows 11. And as much as we all hate ai, it was really useful when I had a quick weird question during my install.)
Definitely not wrong. As someone who works nowhere near the tech sector who has attempted to dabble in Linux, that initial learning curve is just too high. I don’t have the time to dedicate to that, I have other interests in my life
Not even Linux, the READMEs of a lot of code repositories are sometimes made for people who already know what it is, but seem alien to anyone just trying to understand “does this codebase help with my use-case?”
My experience is the opposite. Open a project’s website, it’s full of marketing talk where I can’t find what the project does in a minute or several minutes. Open Github instead, the readme starts with “this thing is for doing X with Y under Z circumstances”. These days I mostly skip sites and go straight to Github.
Maybe you need the sites instead, idk.
I always go to the primary source as first port of contact, but sometimes it’s not clear what the code does.
For example, I need a JTAG adapter on my ESP32 via USB that I can program my laptop through the device. Does this 10-starred seemingly perfect repo do what I want[1]? https://github.com/emard/esp32s3-jtag
No, the ESP32 is only the JTAG host, you do not actually get access to the pins, so if you want to do custom timings you will not be in luck. This is not clear. I have seen dozens more like this. ↩︎
Ah, well, afaict this is a rather more specialized case. Here, I’m a complete noob because I don’t do electronics, so I have no idea what a JTAG is or how I could use this. An intermediate scenario would be if you found their site in search, and it said “have you ever wished to connect one thing to another thing?” instead of the JTAGs and stuff. This case, when you basically know what it supposedly does but have to pore over documentation or code to figure out details, is a more involved one, and of course, I’ve ran into such stuff aplenty too.
(Out of curiosity, would you be able to beat that code with a C++ stick (or whatever) yourself until it did what you wanted?)
oh okay good to know I’m at least not alone in this experience
Edit: To do it myself, I’d have to implement the JTAG protocol on the GPIO’s directly using arduino or esp libraries, which is not something I would relish doing. Perhaps in MicroPython, but that has limited libraries and it would be a lot of trial and error… and ultimately, I just want to run a JTAG debugger on an ARM core I found, not re-invent a new JTAG debugger
deleted by creator
why are you going to github to compile code if you’re not even comfortable with regular day to day linux use yet? you skipped so many steps, no wonder it’s offputting.
Sir, I’m reacting to a meme, not visiting github.
The beauty of it is that once you work out how Linux and self hosting works, you won’t have time for anything else. So the cliff face learning curve is to dissuade the filthy casuals.
For what it’s worth, Linux mint was pretty simple to install. I think Linux folks tend to sneer at it because it just works without the crazy headaches and hassles we associate with Linux.
(I finally tried Mint rather than pay for windows 11. And as much as we all hate ai, it was really useful when I had a quick weird question during my install.)