People reboot their systems?

…mostly because they have never had to reboot their system 64 times before getting a new machine.

You really didn't have to call me out like that.

I've had my system for ~4 years now, and I think I've rebooted it a grand total of maybe 10 times. Pretty much never voluntarily. Usually due to a power outage or needing to shut down for a hardware upgrade.

I think that the point being made here is that it's not a great idea to hold an actually running soldering iron by the hot bit?

If so, I think that OP's image is supposed to have some sort of thermal insulation stuff around the hot bit, that clear stuff.

The boot sequence is what I was picturing originally, but I didn't know how to word that cleanly for the meme, lol.

Note that on current, systemd-based systems, one probably wants sudo journalctl -kb to show kernel messages for the current boot.

dmesg reads from the in-memory kernel ring buffer. That can be desirable in some cases, but as the name suggests, the "ring buffer" is a "ring"

it has a finite amount of space and eventually, the old stuff gets overwritten by the new stuff. The idea is that a userspace logging daemon, like journald (or syslogd on most older systems) has time to pull the data from the ring buffer out to (potentially much larger) log files on disk.

journalctl will also post-process the output to do things like convert the time-from-boot to a wall clock time, which is generally more useful for correlating with other things.

dmesg

as I can see hints of things going wrong.

Yes!

Even if you don't understand every line, if the system hangs or just takes an unusually long time to boot, you'll be able to see what it's getting stuck on. And even if you don't understand that, you can google DDG the message and find out what it's doing, maybe figure out what's taking so long, what's wrong, and how to fix it.

^This comment is talking about the deluge of log messages you may or may not see (depending on the distro) while booting the system.

Just thought I'd add that, since the meme doesn't actually mention booting. Not sure, where you got that from. 😅

the resulting error messages normally at least give you something to search for

lp0 on fire

And:

#include <errno.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main (void) {
    errno=ENOANO;
    perror("");
    return 0;
}

Yields:

$ ./a.out 
No anode
$

Yesterday I installed a program to run windows games. The installation through the terminal spat out ten different types of “Error reading the jupitos bus” type messages that I simply could not parse, but they sounded grim and serious.

But it ran just fine afterwards so those messages couldn’t have been that important?

It's less of an understanding, and more of a "Hmm that's a lot of good colour text" or "Fuck, that's a lot of bad coloured text!"

Yeah, being able to google stuff that's not working has been a lifesaver for me. Or (and I know it's not popular here) taking a snippet of some confusing output and giving it to an AI to have it explain what things mean.

Just skim to the part that tells you to type "yes, do as I say!"

Imagine syslog getting presented as a streaming video… “hi this is your friendly kernel again and today we’ll have another look at …” * looks at list… “initialising network, loading modules and much more. But first, a message from our sponsor!”

I'm trying! There's a lot.

I just picked a random image of packages being updated.

Or if you mean the Star Trek image, it's from an episode where Uhura and Spock are trying to fix one of the consoles on the bridge. 'Who Mourns for Adonais' season 2, episode 2.