📚 If a new users misuses a piece of software that they reasonably believed should have been easy to use, that's not the user's fault for being dumb—it's the software's fault for misrepresenting itself as being easy to use

This is a generalisation. It varies case-by-case. Do not reply with specific examples where it actually is the user's fault for being dumb (**cough cough** do as I say!).

The purpose of this post is to criticise the Linux community's tendency to blame users for errors caused by misusing "easy" software that wasn't actually easy. This includes downvoting.

If a user is using something that is presented as an "easy" option or in a way that leads them to reasonably believe that something should be easy but ends up messing it up and nuking their installation, that generally represents a failure in UI design.

If there is no fair warning given that an option is "high maintenance" or "advanced", don't fault the user for thinking that they could use it without tinkering out of the box and it would just work.

Think: Arch advertises itself as "user-centric", and explicitly says that it does not attempt to be "user-friendly". However, certain Arch-based distros don't say that, and instead, present themselves as an easy Arch-based distro with all of the benefits and without many of the drawbacks of maintaining an Arch-based distro.

Make no mistake; maintaining an Arch installation is an active task. It is not "install and forget"—we have Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu (+derivatives) for that. But by advertising themselves as easy distros, or even failing to say that they are advanced, they set up new users for failure when they get confused by error messages that, while their meaning is plain and obvious to us more-experienced users, are meaningless unintelligible babble to new users. And thus, when these users make posts on r/linuxquestions or r/linux4noobs, they get downvoted and receive replies with hostile or condescending attitudes. They get told "why didn't you just Google search this?" or the infamous RTFM. Or, they get criticised for not having run a simple command that everyone knows needs to be run before that other command, or that they foolishly changed a config file in an attempt to make their Bluetooth work which ended up breaking their Wi-Fi, and so on.

Recognise that technical Google searching is a skill, as is reading manuals, wikis, and documentation, and that not everyone is good at it. That doesn't make them stupid.