<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Adam Tauno Williams <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:awilliam@whitemice.org">awilliam@whitemice.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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> As a noob years ago, I found debian's website to be very cold and hard<br>
>to find useful information. It does not appear to have changed much since.<br>
> Part of the package that the noob needs is the "what to do when your<br>
> geek friend has gone home." One thing Ubuntu has done a pretty good job<br>
> with is being approachable.<br>
<br>
This is one of the non-technical things that really irritates me about<br>
Ubuntu. This logic is flawed and a "newbie" should be disabused of it,<br>
not indulged. How-to-do-X-on-disto-Y is mostly of the time a waste of<br>
time - back to the fact that it is 99.44% the same software as every<br>
other distro. How to setup a Samba server (beyond what is supported by<br>
whatever wizards are provided), or customize your printer setup, etc...<br>
are all very distribution agnostic. If you lurk on many project lists<br>
for long you'll see this manifest a lot: I'm-running-X-how-can-I-Y? The<br>
answer is pretty much inevitably: see the *project* documentation<br>
because the fact you are using X just doesn't matter. Even if there is<br>
a distribution specific problem or bug - the specific project is more<br>
likely to know as they all *use* the specific software in question.<br>
This ends up frustrating the "newbie" because instead of going to where<br>
people know answers (the specific project) or to good documentation (the<br>
project's documentation) they get sent to habitually out of date Wikis<br>
and huge mail lists predominated by people who don't know more than they<br>
do.<br> </blockquote><div>Speaking of "good documentation," what's<br>that any more? Man pages are pretty minimal,<br>where they exist at all any more, and mostly suggest<br>you read something somewhere else. Man pages<br>
go back to the earliest Unix, and why they have<br>been more or less abandoned in recent years is<br>unclear. In the past they were the documentation.<br><br>And "HowTo" pages. I don't see them referred to<br>
much in this group. Is that still a current concept?<br>i.e., do people write them any more, or keep them<br>current, or is most information now at project <br>sites and spread over endless blogs and Q&A websites?<br>
<br>A guess is that that how-to information is better <br>for more stable projects. But one often enough <br>reads that the authors don't have time to write<br>documentation.<br><br> -- Bob<br><br> </div></div><br>