You didn’t know us. But you answered.
We came to the forum broken — tired, desperate, red-eyed at 3 a.m., begging for help because our mouse wouldn’t move or X wouldn’t start or our bootloader had vanished into the void. We’d tried everything. We were ready to quit. But we typed it up anyway, one last cry into the digital dark:
“Hi, I’m new to Linux. Please help. I think I broke everything.”
And you replied.
You didn’t mock us. You didn’t flex. You didn’t link to some five-year-old thread and say “dupe.” You just dropped knowledge like lightning from a mountaintop:
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
chroot /mnt
grub-install --force
We didn’t even know what half of it meant. But we copied it. We ran it. And it worked.
You never came back to the thread. You didn’t ask for a thank-you. Your avatar was a penguin or a circuit board or some ASCII art dragon. Your signature said something like:
“RTFM. But I’m here if you need me.”
You were the quiet legends. The ones who fixed our systems from thousands of miles away. The ones who *actually understood* what the hell was going on. You spoke fluent config. You lived in `man` pages. You never forgot a flag. You could decode a kernel panic like it was haiku.
To us, you were gods. And you never acted like it.
This page is for you. No usernames, no callouts. Just respect. Just memory. Just thanks.
You answered. And that meant everything.