How to get answers

Sooner or later, you will probably have some kind of problem. For example, you might want to know how to connect to wifi. Now you might think, that searching "Linux connect wifi" would give you a useful result. This is not the case.

How you connect to wifi, depends heavily of the desktop environment you are using. The process will be different in each of them.

Potentially relevant information

The following information are not always important, for example your desktop environment is not important if you look for something about the command line.

• The name of your distribution. "linux failed update" might give you all kind of information, probably something about Ubuntu. If you use Manjaro, this will not be helpful, and "manjaro failed update" will give you better results.
• The name of the desktop environment you are using (especially important if it's not the default of your distribution). "linux extract tar" will give you a tutorial about how to extract a tar in the command line. "kde extract tar" will give you a tutorial about how to do it with gui.
• The exact error message. If your updates fail, "updates fail ubuntu" might not give you useful results, but "ubuntu update Encountered a section with no Package" will probably be more helpful. Usually, the first error is the actual problem, so look out for this one. If you ask a question in a forum, include as much as possible.
• Your hardware specs. "apex crash ubuntu" might give you far worse results than "apex crash ubuntu nvidia geforce 2070ti"
• When asking in a forum, include logs if there are any. You might also try looking at the logs yourself.

But if you give too many information, the results might get worse. If possible, try to generalize: "apex crash ubuntu gnome nvidia geforce 2070ti" might give you worse results than "apex crash linux nvidia". Limiting the search results to the last year might also be useful in some cases. If you ask a question in a forum, always include as much as possible (in a reasonable magnitute).