When getting into OpenBSD, just a fair warning. If you think Gentoo/Arch is very RTFM-y, you will be jarred by how RTFM OpenBSD's culture is.

The OpenBSD community feels like 90s hacker culture. No one will help you if you don’t have the capacity or skills to learn yourself. You need to show efforts and want to learn.

I’m kinda an exception to that TBH. I tend to be more friendly than the larger userbase. They aren’t trying to be mean, they want you to learn in the best possible way. They put all this effort into documentation, it would be an insult to them to neglect their efforts.

Generally, just show you actually had the capacity to learn yourself and showed what you tried, and you’ll be golden.

If you look how I eMail on the ports@ mailing list, I try to make terse yet detailed accounts on what I have tried.

for example: x11/stumpwm broke on a snapshot of -CURRENT.

I sent a mail to look into fixing that.

OpenBSD has very good documentation, but its mainly local and not online.

Learn how to read manpages, read afterboot(8), read the “Welcome to OpenBSD” mail in your user’s inbox. Don’t know how to do that? Check the mail manpage.

I am all for auto-didacticism. That is- learning on your own terms at your own pace because learning matters to you. I feel that when people say “RTFM” they are trying to nudge you on a path to learn in the best way possible.

I would probably never outright say RTFM as a non-joke, but i wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment the people who use it have.

you can’t learn if you don’t try. i don’t think we should shut off new users, and i think largely the OpenBSD userbase agrees with me here. But- when you are learning you can and should expect some things to not work the way you would expect them to.

Realizing the power of self discipline and discovering things is really helpful in easing the inevitable frustration here.

I love the joy of discovery. You probably do too. ❤️