The Linux Mint Discord, Forums, IRC and such are quite good examples of how helping and receiving help should be.
Obviously you always get elitists, trolls and other unwanted users; but I and everyone on their respective teams do try their best to keep their places as clean as possible.
And while your post(s) do have merit, I don't think you should uphold other places not connected to the Mint environment to our standards.
We try to be the change you want it to be, but without users like yourself that won't be possible.
I found here on this bulletin board(if my memory is not failing) people asking how to install XP like themes and being discouraged to do it because they were too new, instead of being told to backup stuff and try following some guidelines or tutorials, or try it on a system that you don't care about(for example a virtual machine), and on my humble opinion this is off-putting to these people say the least.
When a new user asks about something that experienced users know is a bad idea it is generally discouraged, ways to discourage may vary from good to bad, but when experienced users feel that the choice is bad they will say something about it.
Now i'm talking about my personal experience, give me a gentoo image, and a computer with a freshly wiped disk and i will end up not being able to install it, sure i can follow some guides but dominating and understanding what is being done will be a different story at least for the time being, i'm sure that will the right amount of study and research i will be able to fully set-up a gentoo system from the ground up, maybe i'm imagining that installing gentoo is complex and stuff because i have been told so.
Gentoo is after LFS the most complicated distribution to install.
Past experiences with Linux is generally advised.
Users might not want to help completely new people because they would have to explain massive amounts of guides just to be able to teach you how to do a few steps.
Now on Arch(i don't use arch btw) i tried, bonked my head, thought about the issues, researched, figured it out, and sure i can install it and set it up(on the worst case i will install tmux and lynx and follow some arch wiki article to help me)
Why i don't use arch(btw)? too much manual set-up with a distro that i'm not that used to.
Arch Linux did receive an installer option recently, which might be worth checking out.
That said, the Arch community can be a real hit or miss in terms of support issues.
Now give me debian, and i can set up whatever you want, reasonably quick, and reasonably secure(secure enough to not be affected by the usual automated stuff and script kiddies).
And yet here i have been told that i have no skill to replace a display manager and a desktop environment, by someone who don't really know who am i,what is my knowledge limited of.
This does not seem like a huge issue on its own because Debian/Ubuntu/Mint users are generally open and welcoming to people like yourself to experiment and/or need guidance. In this specific case you just ask another person.
Well mates, there is this magical thing called "ASKING FOR CLARIFICATION", or just asking, instead jumping to conclusion, imagine this scenario:
"Hey mate, have you ever set-up a display manager, a window manager or a desktop environment?"
"Hey mate, are you familiar with doing stuff by command lines?"
"Have you tried to do this or that?"
Depending on the distribution there will always be cases where other users assume skill levels, this is not a specific attack against you, but more the vast amount of help people have to provide. You can also try to do it from the other side and elaborate your support request as much as possible, small talk and such is not really something people enjoy when helping people one after another.
I know that people(including me) get lazy and don't do any research before asking something, but even on these cases, don't jump to conclusions, don't leave unnecessary messages, if you are not in the mood to help, just don't bother, you are not being forced to meet a comment quota that if you fail to reach someone will rm -rf /*(for those who don't know, doing this with superuser privileges will erase whatever it can from your root filesystem in a recursive way) your filesystems.
While mean comments are obviously mean, you cannot expect people to help you out if you are not willing to learn and/or pay attention either.
Support requests have 2 or more parties after all.
Please do note that if you encounter unwanted elitism and/or malicious behaviour on our platforms that you are always welcome to speak up and are able to mail the respective teams about it.
While not every decision might go exactly the way you want it to, if the issues you report are fair and in line of actually improving said communities you can be sure that actions will be taken.
