Is Linux Documentation Lacking?

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday December 3, 2009 @03:18AM from the hackers-and-english-don't-always-mix dept.

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 We've discussed before some of open source's documentation being out of date.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?"

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Re:Documentation is very lacking by CasaDelGato · 2009-12-03 03:36 · Score: 5, Informative

The whole Linux Mindset to documentation can be summed up in the phrase "use the man page". Yeah, right. Man pages are only semi-useful if you ALREADY KNOW WHAT COMMAND YOU NEED. Trying to FIND the command to do something is nearly impossible. Almost as bad as trying to find out how to configure something. (just edit the twiddly.da config file in the googly.plex directory, note that the syntax is completely different from every other config file on the system.)