>So if anything goes wrong in my install, it’ll be a lot of forum-hopping and Discord searching to figure it all out

This is not inaccurate, however every time I've had to interface with either Microsoft or Adobe issues, both the professional and community support have been abysmal. Both community forums seem to incentivize engagement to the point where every response is 3+ hyperlinks deep to someone else's vaguely related post.

Maybe the linux forums self select for independent problem solvers..

Community forums/support from big companies like Microsoft and Adobe tend to be completely useless. In most cases, all threads follow the same flow:

* Question with reasonable amount of detail.

* A reply from some "Community Helper" (Rank: Gold): "did you try reading the help files?"

* Another person with a "Staff" badge: "this isn't our department"

[Thread closed.]

The worst online fora for support are for 'for profit' companies.

I had one where I was trying to get mongosh (or similar, I think they have had multiple shells) to change some print behavior I had multiple users coming in and giving me incorrect answers to a different question that was easily found in the docs and then begging me to mark the question as solved with them as the respondent and they were always written as though I was some sort of child-king that needed to be kow-towed to.

This kind of gamification of support fora incentivises responding rather than responding with correct answers.

Conversely Linux fora always have people who are at best polite and largely know their shit. They will help you hunt down the problem until the point where you hit that it's actually a firmware bug and you gain skills along the way.

> either Microsoft or Adobe issues

Please run sfc /scannow closes topic

Both MS and Adobe's forums are a complete joke, LLMs give better support than their respective "communities."

For sure. Despite its reputation, troubleshooting is much easier on Linux than on commercial OSes. It's not even close.

I've set Kagi to blacklist sites like answers.microsoft.com for a reason.

> Both community forums seem to incentivize engagement to the point where every response is 3+ hyperlinks deep to someone else's vaguely related post.

As a total sidenote, I do wonder when exactly stack exchange/overflow saw the writing on the wall with AI coding?

I don’t need to look for Denver 069 2004 post about MQTT request response options where someone pointed him to a now 404 link, I just talked to Claude about it and we came up with a solution directly to my problem, using my code as an example.

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