The title might not explain the idea very well, but let me put it here. Let us say we have somebody with an Nvidia problem that occurs when Unity loads.. For example Unity freezes after installing recommended Nvidia drivers

The OP wants to know why this happens and prevent the problem from happening again, yet it has been suggested that the question is a duplicate of What should I do when Ubuntu freezes?

The latter simply mentions how to solve a freeze. Basically is not solving how the user got to the problem or how he/she can prevent it form happening again, it just links to another question where the problem is already happening in the worst case scenario, a total freeze.

I do not think (Personal opinion) a question which is looking into how to solve a problem before it happens should be pointed or mentioned as duplicate to another question where the problem has already happened.

Of course, this does not apply to many questions, but some like this are the exception I want to say, since solving the problem before it happens is better than trying to solve it after it happened. Also, an answer could include a referent to the question that is similar, but not close it because it "sounds" similar or the objective (In a machiavellican way) is the solution. The truth is, the more the user learns of the problem, the better he/she is solving it, not only on their own, but helping other.

Waiting for the user to get to the problem (Worst problem like the total freeze above) instead of preventing the problem altogether is in my opinion not very helpful. If he/she knows why the problem happened or at least a basic idea of why, it can help a little.

  • You could improve the sentence "Basically is not solving how the ...", I guess it could be meant as "Basically it is not solving..." – guntbert Feb 11 '13 at 17:57
  • Is this a general problem, or is it a problem relating specifically to that one canonical question? Are there other good examples of this? Also, is this even an example of this? That question is not just about how to fix a freeze; it has answers about how to troubleshoot one, too. (And currently it's even tagged troubleshooting, which should encourage more such answers, though I'm not entirely sure that's a good tag for us to have.) – Eliah Kagan Feb 11 '13 at 18:03
  • Many answers there are about troubleshooting, and not just fixing the current freeze. Here's the first 6 I saw: 1 2 3 4 5 6 If a question is duped to that (or closed voted but not yet duped) and the author has already tried everything applicable there, they should put detailed information about that in the question (or if they know about that canonical question, they can include it initially). – Eliah Kagan Feb 11 '13 at 18:09
  • @EliahKagan Can no find any other one right now but the idea is to first try to explain why it happens before jumping to the last option which would be, how to get out of the hole the problem created. I think this would help more. Of course as Jorge mentions below, it is tough to do this, to classify and to know which questions are duplicate, off topic or any category that can help. – Luis Alvarado Feb 11 '13 at 18:26

Look at the answer you wrote and look at the answers on the canonical question, they're pretty much the same.

I don't see how we can be be expected to know how to solve problems before they happen, if that were the case I'd be using that skill in Las Vegas.

Besides that question is an offtopic bug report. :)

  • Yes, it is mostly a bug report, but my point being that some questions (I can't find any other examples right now) is to explain why it would happen, because there are many problems that end in a system freeze, but in the system freeze question there is a general explanation of why, maybe a way of explaining for example, video related freezes, sound related freezes, something like that – Luis Alvarado Feb 11 '13 at 18:22
  • "Besides that question is an offtopic bug report. :)" This applies to pretty much all "Why does this occur?" questions. The answer is either "Your fault." or "It's a bug." - I doubt that's in line with our Q&A format. – user98085 Feb 11 '13 at 20:09
  • You're right, bugs aren't inline with our Q+A format, which is why questions about freezes and stuff are always awkward, we're not fit to handle them, this isn't a bug tracker. – Jorge Castro Feb 11 '13 at 20:12

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