[HowTo] Request support

[maycne.sonahoz]

Difficulty: ★☆☆☆☆

Strong of its many members, the Manjaro support forum can provide you help whenever you have an issue with your Manjaro installation. But in order to work efficiently, we shall also ask you to follow three major points.

Provide context

Simply signaling an issue is rarely enough to understand how it occurred. It is thus important to provide details on how it happened:

• Detail prior actions leading to the issue.

• List solutions and guides you already tried, with links whenever possible.
  [HowTo] Post screenshots and links

• Provide any related error messages.
  [HowTo] Find error logs

• Provide your system information, whenever relevant or when in doubt.
  [HowTo] Find system information

• Provide text information as formatted text
  [HowTo] Post command output and file content as preformatted text

• Even if you don’t have access to your usual graphical session, you may still manage:
  [HowTo] Reach a minimal system
  [HowTo] Use the terminal / TTY
  https://forum.manjaro.org/t/howto-use-public-command-line-pastebin-services-without-installing-anything/38378

Entice others to help you

This may seem like a weird thing to ask, but the point here is to avoid rebuking members from helping because of your manners.

• Create one thread per issue.
  Mixing several issues in a single thread makes support more difficult, as it would require to always contextualize which issue a reply is for.

• Do not hijack an existing thread
  If the solution provided in that thread does not work for you, or if it doesn’t provide a solution yet, do not add your issue to it, as they might have different causes and thus may require different solutions.
  You can though link that thread from yours, as one you checked in order to fix your issue.

• Use a concise, relevant title.
  Use the title to broadly summarize your issue. Pleas for help do not provide any information, while details should be kept in the main post, where you can organize them.

• Provide asked information
  Failing to provide additional information may prevent us from understanding your situation, and thus from suggesting you appropriate solutions.
  If you do not know or understand how to get that information, you must say so.

• Do not write as you would in an instant messenger.
  Use punctuation and paragraphs, check your grammar.

• Do your best to be understood.
  When someone questions your description, it usually means you didn’t use the right words. Sometimes it is worth using more words to correctly explain yourself.

• Do not rant.
  It’s easy to blame Manjaro and/or its community for your issue. But that does not make you any closer from finding why that issue happens in the first place, and thus neither are you from resolving it.

• Don’t be impatient.
  This support forum is not a hotline that guarantees a 5-minute answer, but a community forum where members voluntarily help when they have the time and knowledge.

• Don’t pick the wrong fight.
  No need to lose your temper from other people’s remarks and interrogations, even if they seem “noobish” or irrelevant.
  This forum has rules, which apply equally to newcomers and veterans. If you deem a moderator needs to intervene, flag the infringing post and keep on resolving your issue.

Stay active

Asking for support does not mean someone else will take full control of the matter for you. In order for the solution to come, and afterwards to stay, there are some things you still need to do.

Be smart in the terminal

Resolution suggestions and extra information provision very often take form of a command to use in the terminal. In some cases, such provided command lacks argument values because you didn’t provide that information before. You will then need to replace the relevant parts with the associated value only you know.

Keep searching

The community may be knowledgeable, but we don’t know everything. Sometimes nobody can timely provide a definitive solution to your issue, so it is important you keep looking for answers on your side.

Have the will to learn

Contrarily to systems that magically solve anything for you, or others that change slowly enough to avoid most troubles, Manjaro is a cutting-edge distribution which, despite regularly holding updates to provide an as smooth experience as possible, still stays very close to upstream and the changes they bring. As such, it is important for you to at least learn why issues arise.
We certainly do not ask you to learn how to debug application code nor to build a kernel, but simply knowing the overall logic behind some processes. And on the long run, maybe, you will even be able to resolve anything yourself!

Highlight the solution

If someone does provide a solution to your thread, please mark it so. This way, other users sharing your issue will instantly know what to do. This will also show the thread as resolved when browsing and searching.

Share

As you may find solutions or knowledge by yourself, we would be very grateful if you contribute in return, sharing your findings – even for your own issues! – and maybe becoming a helper yourself on the long run.

[bozzoh]

Ca me rappelle les “RTFM” en réponse que je recevais à mes débuts dans les années 2000, demander de l’aide c’est bien et légitime mais en dernier recours en gros…oui ok mais quand on boot sur un écran noir demander de l’aide en premier recours c’est bien aussi, tout dépend de l’importance du cas en fait

It reminds me of the “RTFM” in response I received when I started in the 2000s, asking for help is good and legitimate but as a last resort basically…yes ok but when you boot on a black screen asking for help as a first resort is also good, it all depends on the importance of the case in fact

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Moderator edit: Added English translation via Google Translate

[maycne.sonahoz]

@bozzoh

oui ok mais quand on boot sur un écran noir demander de l’aide en premier recours c’est bien aussi

Oui c’est légitime, mais l’idée est que bien souvent, la solution existe déjà, même pour des problèmes graves.

Après, je pense que dans la plupart des cas, quand la solution est déjà documentée, on continuera de simplement l’y lier. Si on lie ce tutoriel, c’est que l’utilisateur ne s’est vraiment pas foulé…

Yes it is legitimate, but the idea is that very often, the solution already exists, even for serious problems.

Afterwards, I think that in most cases, when the solution is already documented, we will continue to simply link it to it. If we link this tutorial, it is that the user has really not trodden…

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Moderator edit: Added English translation via Google Translate

[alven]

@maycne.sonahoz

Oui c’est légitime, mais l’idée est que bien souvent, la solution existe déjà, même pour des problèmes graves.

It is not that much comfortable to search from mobile device (also note that mobile internet connection may be not perfect to open many tabs in try to find solution for exact case) when you can’t boot your system and have no LiveCD to boot up from, so the importance is also a factor here.

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Now this topic deserves to be linked to a user’s “please help”-described topics instead of “provide good information” thread as it is more general and links to “provide good info” thread also.

I think it is great defragmentation, consolidation, organization work done here to start to solve problems as by themselves and by providing well-described topics.
Thank you for [How to].
May be to made it to be wiki-post?

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Further improvement ideas:

1. (may be separate topic, which will be linked here): how to search a solution for the problem a user met.
2. to post the problem description and solution which works for a user to make others to be able to find it.

PS

@maycne.sonahoz

Difficulty: ★☆☆☆☆

True. It is not the simplest work to search, find, several times to try and to finally solve a problem.

[alven]

May be we can pin this thread in sub-category instead of “How to provide good information” or along side with it?
Can’t find that option from within my user account.

[maycne.sonahoz]

I reworked the tutorial in order to focus on the support part. The troubleshooting part has been moved to a separate guide:

[HowTo] Troubleshoot anything

Difficulty: ★☆☆☆☆ Experiencing an unexpected issue is never an enjoyable moment. Yet very often, resolving it is actually a matter of simply reading the messages forwarded to the user, and acting accordingly. Find error messages Very often when an applications crashes, and sometimes when it misbehaves, it prints an error message somewhere. If the message appears on screen, like in a popup or in the terminal, do read it. In most cases, it hints at what goes wrong (a missing file, a wrong con…