Actually, it’s going to be more about how it’s “like learning French from the Internet at large.” But that wasn’t nearly good enough to be title material. So…
Recently I’ve been on a useless computer-fucking-around kick, which inevitably means that I’ve been (as I have on and off [but more off] for years) dabbling in the shark, piranha, and frustration-infested waters of Linux. Let me start off by saying that Linux is a great operating system the minute you trick it into doing exactly what you want it to do. Let me also say that Linux is an awful operating system for your blood pressure, your patience, and your level of alcohol consumption while you’re still trying to trick it into doing what you want it to do.
To explain my frustrations with this operating system, I will now create a very weak but possibly humorous analogy between learning Linux and learning the French language, in which I analyze trying to learn the foreign language the way I learned Linux.
The first part is relatively easy. You decide one day you want to learn “French”, so you google something like “basic french words” or “French for beginners”. It’ll teach you things like “Bonjour”, “Ça va”, and “Je m’appelle”. Great! This part is easy and widely available, and now you know how to say a few things that you’ll say a LOT, but in and of themselves will accomplish nothing. (Just like cd, ls, mkdir, and mv are easy to figure out and get information for in Linux).
Now it’s time to move on to something more applicable.
So, you try to learn the verb “Aller,” for “to go”. So you try to use “Aller”.
root@French: /# je vais
The verb ‘aller’ can be found in the following packages:
* aller
Try: apt-get install
So, you try apt-get install aller and it starts to install. However, it has decided for you that it needs other things for “Aller” to work, like “Avoir”. So you try apt-get install avoir and it tells you that “Avoir” needs other things to work properly, like “Aller”. Wait. You need “Aller” to install “Avoir” and you need “Avoir” to install “Aller”? What the fuck is that?
Already nearing suicide, you decide to try the Google. You search Google for “Aller and avoir dependency problem”. You now receive 309,387 results, 90% of which are in various user forums. Having no idea where to start, you choose the first result.
The first result is a forum where someone describes exactly your problem, without exception. You get excited: “Perfect! I’ll be running in no time!”
Yeah, you wish. You scroll down eagerly to check the responses, and you get only these two: “OMG ME 2 I HAVE THE PROBLEM CAN U HELP ME PLZ?!!!!” and “You don’t want to use French. Try using Swedish.”
Confounded, confused, and continuously nearing the edge, you check the next Google result. In this one someone is having a similar problem, but it’s with “ir” in the fairly similar Spanish language. You figure, well, most distributions that stemmed from Latin have the same basic words, so maybe you can try that. Someone in the Spanish thread recommends that you circumvent the problem by typing apt-get install aller -l –spoonbutt /gorbachev (X554,22,OMGWTF) | /etc/bin/humongously/long/path/could/this/get/any/more/painful/?/ After mistyping this exactly 73 times, you finally type it correctly and, figuring your troubles are over, you strike the enter key with ceremony.
apt: ERROR 75955: This isn’t Spanish, idiot.
By now, the average person’s computer would have quickly made its way out of the nearest window, but you have a Trade Center steel will: Even the burning jet fuel that is your boiling blood won’t weaken it yet. Besides, nobody said, or even implied, that this would be easy. Maybe you have to try to attack the problem from an entirely different angle: You never really truly confirmed that “aller” didn’t exist on your system, and you’re using a pretty complete distribution of French, so you’d think something so basic would come pre-installed.
However, you’re presented with a difficult task: Since you don’t yet know how to use French, you don’t even know if there’s a proper tool for searching for anything that may already be installed. And to top it off, most of the folders therein are fantastically awful at describing their purposes. Folders like etc, var, usr, and lmaouractuallyusingthis?.
So, you return to the google, and it tells you that on most systems, “aller” goes in /etc/verb/aller. Having been jaded by your experiences thus far, you look in /opt/bin/lolol/vxdt.bo/aller. You find it there immediately. However, it’s a hollow victory: You just spent hours trying to install Aller when you already had it.
So, now you try to use Aller again. You type
root@French: /opt/bin/lolol/vxdt.bo/aller/# je vais
Aller: ERROR 843: Bad parameter, try “aller -?” for help.
You do exactly that, and it gives you a list of different tags you can add to your aller command to do everything but what you want to do. Like aller -q to replace every letter in the language with the letter Q, or aller -rj to give you a rimjob. At a loss, and no longer trusting the google, you try one last thing.
root@French: /opt/bin/lolol/vxdt.bo/aller/# man aller
You are presented with a literary work that has a 16th-grade reading level and is actually longer than any human being can read in a lifetime. While reading this manual, you eventually starve to death and are found months later as a pile of rotting flesh that still looks just a bit peeved. The police see that you were trying to learn French by yourself and nod knowingly.
“There’s another one, Jim.”
“Shame, Fred, it’s a shame. They just don’t know when to give up.”
