About suggesting that visitors here search for common topics

Continuing the discussion from What are the differences between zsh, bash, and fish?:

I don’t agree with the idea that it is best to search the web and read all the posts.

First of all, there are more posts on almost every topic than anyone can read in many lifetimes.

But the bigger problem is that people who don’t know something are also often not able to judge which opinions are helpful and which are not helpful. So I think when we can help somebody (as you did) we should help and we can’t we should remain silent. :slight_smile:

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It is generally encouraged that if you can add value then you should. It is also encouraged that if you cannot add value to the discussion that you not post. This is also why off-topic posts and sidetracking discussions are discouraged.

You will note that @ankursinha pointed that out with his comment then actually linked to two different very informative and helpful sites which answered the original question. His post seems meant to stifle the tendency to jump in with a ‘this works for me’ long-winded back and forth.

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Okey but if you look into what i asked there is not off topic though and in fedora i didn’t find a good info about why fedora using bash and i find that zsh and fish have many good feature practical feature but fedora is not using it there are distros use fish like garuda or kali.
And it is extremely hard for someone who don’t have very good knowledge about linux or those stuff.
@ankursinha what he pointed out i have seen this that article have information but a discussion may bring some better answers to the table.
But what @ankursinha done was wrong that he close my topic that time that i don’t expected.
thanks

Answers in forums such as this often get into the subjective opinion position. Which is better, Windows or MacOS? (example, please don’t answer this question!). If a question might lead towards an explosion of subjective answers, there is now much more confusion than helpful answer. Much more difficult to use self control and merely say “Here’s a couple of articles that could be helpful. In my personal experience, I find X has better capabilities but Y has a larger support group for issues.” Even that can lead to 100 other responses pointing out why their favorite is X. Or Y. Or Z, which isn’t even part of the discussion.
At the same time, an attempt to cut the discussion short quickly can seem brusque, harsh, stifling. Moderators in one of my other favorite forums seem to somewhat frequently use a canned response indicating the question invites a subjective response (opinion), and the subject is closed to further discussion.
I think the intent in this case was good, but could well be taken in a manner not intended. My apologies even for this message if taken not as I intended; my intent is merely to suggest that being a technical expert as well as an expert in positive communications is a pretty tough thing to do, and overall I see communications here that show good technical communications as well as good human communications. Nice to see that.

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OK, so I still think the post should’ve remained closed, and here I’ll attempt to explain why.

First, to repeat what @mhdave has noted (thanks @mhdave!), general questions of the form “A vs B vs C” or “Which is better A or B” and so on are far too vague, too general, to non-specific to result in good discussion. We know this from years and years of forums and discussion channels. Sure, there will be information there, but the discussion is usually so opinionated that the noise in there makes it hard to filter down any useful information. If we get unlucky, such discussions also tend to receive responses detailing why people dislike a tool they don’t use, and that rubs others the wrong way, which then results in emotionally charged reactions—descending into flame wars.

See here:

It doesn’t even include the distribution flame wars (Ubuntu vs Fedora vs Mint vs Arch vs Debian vs $distro), the editor flame wars (vim vs emacs vs nano vs peco vs vscode vs $IDE), the programming language flame wars (C vs C++ vs Java vs Python vs $language) or the desktop environment flame wars (Gnome vs KDE vs LXDE vs $DE). There’s really no end to this sort of opinion based discussion—you’ll see them in channels and forums all the time.

So, needless to say: we want to avoid them. The standard answer to these is “They are all good tools, try them out, see what you like, use it” and this requires us to do our own research to make up our minds.

Next, this question and other questions of this form are not Fedora specific. On this Fedora community forum we do need to draw a line somewhere to what queries are appropriate and what are not. This boundary is also not easy to find, but in general, the guidelines we (I?) follow is that the question should somehow, even if very vaguely, link to Fedora.

So for example, if you’d have asked “Why is bash the default shell on Fedora?” I wouldn’t have closed it, even though it would have a similar risk of descending into a general discussion of shells. At least there, I’d expect someone to point out that the default shell can be changed for each user and so on.

But see—that’s not what you asked. :slight_smile:

So, better questions would’ve been:

  • why is bash the default shell on Fedora?
  • can I use fish in Fedora?
  • can I change the default shell?

and so on because they’re more likely to result in specific discussion. Your question in it’s current form is, in my book, off topic.

I sympathise with this, since we all find ourselves in such situations. However, there’s no easy way around learning something to make a choice. We just have to do our research. It doesn’t matter what sources we start from—once we’ve read a few, we will see patterns emerge. These will give us enough information to decide on:

  • the main question we are looking to answer
  • the quality of opinions we’ve come across

and then we loop until we have strong enough opinions to make a choice.

Asking a question that has been discussed endlessly on a new forum will not get us any better answers. In this specific question, why would answers on a Fedora specific forum be expected to be better than one on a general Linux forum like stack exchange?

So in conclusion, it is not new for us mods to have different opinions to others on the forum. That will continue to happen. I’ll try and make my responses better in the future to help the poster understand why I’ve taken the rather extreme looking action of closing a topic. It will not be as detailed as this post of course, but it will be better than what I wrote this time. Apologies.

PS: I’ve unmarked the post about zsh that was marked as an answer to the original post. It’s an opinion, but it is not the right answer because there is no correct answer to such topics. This shows another aspect of why such topics are hard and why we like to avoid them—there is no correct answer.

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Hi
If you kindly see my question
I haven’t asked like a vs b vs c which one is best my question was what are the advantage and disadvantage of using a b c
I never go with some question where a controversy can occur but maybe my question was not that well though
But i think you can edit my question if you want but closeing a topic is undemocratic.
But no issues.
Another one is you said ubuntu vs fedora vs arch i can give them some advantage and disadvantage about all of them so that that person can decide what he want to use.
[/quote]
So, better questions would’ve been:

  • why is bash the default shell on Fedora?
  • can I use fish in Fedora?
  • can I change the default shell?
    [/quote]

Your 2 3 question is not usefull as i can simply web search it
1 one is not required as my question was regarding advantage and disadvantage.
And i understand that maybe something have less advantage less features but due to widely use we are useing that.
I know there are no best it depends on the user but having a info detailed can make someone switch to.
And i don’t want any answer if i get some info about those i will make that choice my own.
Thanks everyone
@ankursinha love your work and contribution in fedora but you should not close my topic.

Sometimes it is useful to close topics before we exactly end up in discussions like this. :slight_smile:
@ankursinha perfectly knows how a forum works, how online discussions (and not only, I think) could end up. It is sufficient to read a question to predict the future :crystal_ball: (this is the so called experience), and take action before it happens.

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Yes i know he knows
But i didn’t ask the difference between them or anything else
I asked the advantage and disadvantage.
And i hope it was a good question and asking small questions will not help community maybe it will help me but not someone else but if we have a discussion on advantage and disadvantage we can give them the link.
And truly my intention was not to make a controversy.
But maybe my question was not written nicely as i though it would have or may be you guys misinterpreted my question.

And next time i will be more cautious about that not to make anything which may lead to contro

Only one rational answer possible to the question what advantages have these apps. Try them for yourself and see what is the best for you.

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Take it easy @frankjunior
No problem.

The point is exactly this one.
It could be interpreted in every way by everyone :slight_smile: Leading to different opinions, tastes, debates, and in the worst cases, to flames, sealioning, etc.
We aren’t against discussions or opinions, eh. Indeed the topic was reopened. But since the web is full of these endless discussions about advantages or disadvantages of these [non-strictly Fedora] related tools, we would like to avoid the possibility to start a new endless discussion on this forum too :smiley:

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Yes i have mentioned that it is not fedora related but mattdm removed that line
Anyway let’s end this topic now.
And thanks every one :fedora:
And now i am using fish just because it have auto complete feature.
:fedora:

Should i edit my topic name. As ut can make contro $done

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I guess to me, this specific question seems inherently Fedora related — it is about different packages that provide similar functionality that are packaged and available to users in Fedora Linux. And then it goes further by asking speifically:

  • why is one of them the default?
  • is it okay / safe to switch?

The first is clearly Fedora specific (Debian-based distros have a different default for root, for example, but we made a different choice. And MacOS uses zsh by default.)

And the second actually very much could be. There are packages in the Fedora repositories which are available and which can replace some default components, but if you do so, a lot of assumptions might break. (Like, you can enable systemd-networkd on Fedora Workstation, but there’s gonna be a lot of gotchas.) Changing the shell is pretty fundamental, so it’s reasonable to be looking out for those.

All that said, I totally agree that we want this forum to be focused on practical, direct help, and isn’t the place for editor wars or fights over preferences — and yeah, “which is best” tends to be very personal.

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+100 to this. I’m disagreeing as human being here, not as Official Fedora Project Leader Pronouncement or anything. And I absolutely value your perspective on this.

I should clarify my question was may be not right
I think personal preference is a thing that is why we are using linux
Now it was all about knowledge i asked for basic knowledge as i think, i have searched internet for details but i can’t find a reliable source.
And i think what someone will use it is totally upon them but what we can give knowledge about stuff so that person can self figure out what they what to use. That is my thinking.

Thank you for considering this @ankursinha
In my 1st post on this forum, I asked if I could uninstall Gnome-Software…
In addition to blocking my post, didn’t even welcome me…
It really hurt me…
At the time I even thought it was an act of a South American dictator, or someone without empathy…

@luca , ouch! Sorry we didn’t make you feel welcome. Perhaps I can be the first? Welcome to the forum, and we look forward to your questions, answers, thoughts as we all together work to help others in the forum.

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You’re referring to this post from May:

I’m afraid the post had features of a rant (of being flamebait), and so was closed:

  • the topic is a negative statement rather than a question or discussion topic
  • your posts were there include multiple exclamations, and phrases like “I’m not a child to be treated that way!”

Additionally, Gnome and Gnome-software have been common topics open to bashing and you’ll find such posts are routinely closed on forums to prevent them escalating into emotionally charged discussions.

I note that even when closing your post, I did answer your query—removing gnome-software did tend to pull out lots of system components, and I haven’t checked recently to see if the situation has changed.


You have already contacted me privately about this, where I explained the case to you.

From that post, our private conversation, and your recent comment here, I’m afraid I still think that you should please reconsider what and how you post to the forum. (You may not realise it, but you’ve compared me to a South American dictator here, and suggested that I lack empathy—both personal and hurtful remarks.). Such remarks are certainly OK to think (we all do so at some time or the other!), but they should be kept out of forum posts because they tend to result in emotionally charged discussions.


I wasn’t sure I wanted to post this, but I felt it backed me into a corner where I had to defend my moderation decision (already an example of some emotion creeping in here). However, it’s the only one I’ll respond to. This was certainly not meant to be an open invitation to call me things and critique my moderation style. :slight_smile:

Please also know that there are sufficient folks on the forum that will ask me to step aside if my contributions here are considered problematic—there’s no ill will about this sort of thing amongst us friends.

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Your contributions are highly appreciated.

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No i think your contribution is extremely important for a healthy good reliable fedora community aka askfedora.

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@luca, like Dave, I’m sorry you didn’t feel welcome, and very sorry you felt hurt.

At the same time, I’m completely supportive of @ankursinha’s decision and action on that post, and in general all of the work he’s done to make this site successful — and welcoming and friendly.

I believe you didn’t mean the post to be an attack on the GNOME Software authors in that post — but please also remember that a lot of people do act that way on many Linux forums. And the tone also seems to me pretty strong (stating flat out that the way the software works is “not correct”, saying that it is treating you like a child). And there was plenty of room for that to get worse, or attract more replies emboldened to pile on in the same manner. I’ve seen it happen on Reddit over and over.

Remember that moderating a busy site is difficult, stressful, and often thankless. So moderators end up extra sensitive to this kind of thing, and especially about topics where it happens over and over. I don’t think it seems like Ankur acted without empathy. And it was just a topic closed, not a ban or something,or even a warning.

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