Slashdot Mirror
Is Linux Documentation Lacking?
eldavojohn writes "A number of blog posts are surfacing that are calling out the helpful open source community on their documentation. No, not the documentation for the highly skilled technical people, but the documentation from beginner to apprentice. A two-part series by Carla Schroeder lists bad documentation as 'Linux Bug #1' and advises users to use Google as the documentation. We've discussed before some of open source's documentation being out of date. Is it really as bad as these blogs paint it? Has it come down to using Google before a man page?"
The first time I tried linux, I already knew about man (from Slashdot posts, no less).
Well man just confused me more than anything else. Unreadable and full of jargon. Linux, I feel, does need some form of guide for newbies. I'm not afraid of the command line, but just listing out a whole bunch of switches with some description of what they do that itself doesn't actually mean anything to me, isn't enough.
Google reveals a lot of very helpful and well-written newbie guides though. Perhaps the best of those should be adapted and built-in to the documentation shipping with new distros?
>>>man
>>>apropos
If the user has to type a "hidden" command in order to access help files, then the system is already broke. This is the advantage mature OSes like Windows and MacOS have - you can access the help files with a mouse click.
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