Thank you for posting this Artem because there seems to be a serious misunderstanding. We discussed this with the other mods when you first mentioned a "ban" and we haven't been able to understand what you are referring to. If any of us said something that made you feel you were being "threatened with a ban", then we must have not expressed ourselves clearly. As far as we can tell, none of us ever knowingly threatened you with any ban nor was a ban ever in question.
That said, the problem isn't leaving a link per se, there are various issues here:
Leaving a Google Search link is pointless: Google will tailor the results to the user, so the results you see won't be the results the OP sees. And, since you are a *nix geek, you have probably trained your Google well over the years to show you relevant stuff. It is entirely possible that the search will be far less useful to the OP than you expect.
Leaving a link to google with no explanation can feel like you're telling the user "just search, you lazy idiot". I understand this may not be the intention, but it can come across that way. In other words, this would be fine:
You can find many articles explaining this if you try searching for "foo" and "bar". Please have a look and ask a new question if it is still not clear.
This, however, is at best curt and at worst can be received as rude:
https://www.google.com/search?q=foo+bar
Believe me, I completely understand the frustration of dealing with users who don't even bother to run a basic search before asking. However, if you are not willing to put in the effort to write out an explanatory comment (which is more than understandable!), then the best thing to do is just ignore the question. Leaving a Google link is just not very pleasant for anyone involved.
You mentioned LMGTFY links. Those are actually explicitly banned on the Stack Exchange network, so yes, please never use them.
Now, you also mentioned leaving a link suggesting a different resource such as the NVIDIA forums. As far as I am concerned, at least, that's absolutely fine! I would ask you to actually write a message instead of just dumping a link, however. So, instead of just
forums.developer.nvidia.com/c/…
Write something like:
NVIDIA has its own Linux related forums so you are likely to get better answers there: forums.developer.nvidia.com/c/…
Or, even better, make it clear that there is nothing wrong with the question, the OP didn't break any rule and the question is on topic here (assuming it is), but they simply could also use a different resource:
This question is perfectly on topic and welcome here, but you might also want to try over at the NVIDIA forums since they will have more expertise on this sort of thing.
Just something so the OP doesn't feel that we're kicking them out and they understand that you are actually trying to help.
There's another issue with link comments: when you leave a link to somewhere else, and that other place has the answer, then you have basically removed the incentive of anyone to post an answer, leaving us with an unanswered question and no increase in the net amount of information on the site. The entire point of the SE network is to provide answers here. Yes, that does sometimes mean repeating information, but frankly we often improve on the quality of what is available elsewhere. For example, someone with your knowledge and experience would be able to distill the information from the external link and make it more accessible to the OP and the next few dozen or thousand users with the same question.
So yes, we far, far prefer that you repeat the information (especially if you improve on it) and provide an answer rather than a link which is a signpost indicating where an answer might be found. Plus, links rot and break and are not always available. We want to build a library of answers here not a collection of links that might not work a month from now.
Finally, what constitutes "rude" is a very hard question to answer and one that nobody has ever been able to give a general answer to. What is rude for you might not be rude for me and what is rude in my culture might be polite in yours etc. That is indeed a problem and there is no good solution. The best solution we've come up with is to have people who are elected moderators and act as "human exception handlers".
What usually happens is that another user flags something as rude, and then we have a look. We will discuss such things between us and if we all agree something is rude, then we call it rude. We don't go around searching for these things, we see what users flag for our attention and what we happen to come across as users of the site ourselves.
Obviously, we won't always be "right" (whatever that means in this context) and we won't be 100% impartial, but we try our best and ask for the opinion of the other mods to be sure that we avoid ever having one person deciding on this sort of thing.
Yes, that isn't a perfect system but it's the best we have. When you feel that we've acted wrongly, please do exactly as you did now and open a discussion on Meta! We will explain our point of view and if it turns out that the community disagrees, well then the community's opinion will always overrule the mods'.
So, in summary, you were not threatened with a ban or certainly not intentionally and my apologies if you felt you were. Posting links is not a problem, posting certain links and in certain ways (with no context) is the problem. And LMGTFY links are not allowed.