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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 We've discussed before some of open source's documentation being out of date.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?"
This is one of the key reasons Linux is not mainstream for users (not us geeks but real users). The user does not want to learn how to do anything more on his computer than get is work done or enjoy the entertainment. User level documentation simple does not exist.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
or help files for that matter. But I don't think this is really the problem. It's how often does the user feel compelled to consult the documentation or help files in their normal daily work that matters.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
As a linux user since 1995, I have found the documentation to be little more than it was around 2000. It's easier to do a google search than try to find an answer in a man page. Not only that, the man page rarely has useful examples, one of the biggest problems.
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
As often as not, the only hits you get are posts in forums where someone is asking the exact same question you need answered... and getting no replies. Since 2005.
Writing documentation is hard work and is boring. It is also thankless.
The funny thing is that documentation for the most technical programs tends to be very good. PHP, Perl, Apache, Postgres, and MySql all do seem to have good documentation.
Gnome not so much. Many other apps also seem to lack good docs. X is just a disaster. It is documented but it is still a pain when things fail they are a huge mess to fix.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
In a word, yes, many/most linux docs suck.
Man is useful once you understand the basics of how a command works. However, if you're sufficiently green, decoding the language in many of the man pages is difficult. When executing certain system management tasks as root, a mistake can be catastrophic. Google will pull up the man page for you, but also the infinitely more educational blog and faq pages that decribe what a command does, when you use it and how to trouble shoot problems encountered with it.
The problem with Google, is the non-official blogs and faqs frequently reference older version of the command line tools bundled in the latest distros. Occasionally, the tool author radically alters the tools between releases rendering the non-official docs inaccurate... Then the neophyte/newbie hobbyist is up the creek with a paddle.
Getting the detail you want out of a man page is often harder than finding the relevant bits on Google. And of course, man pages don't help you at all if you don't know which command you want to be using ; and let's face it, for a given task, there might be three ways of doing it.
I'm still a relative Linux novice despite having used it for some time now, but I'm a programmer and prepared to slog through documentation and web pages to get things going.
Example - the prune argument of find. I'll give a limited-edition photon to the first person who figures out the way to use the prune argument to produce a list of files that _doesn't_ match a particular path pattern, solely limiting themselves to the man page, without using Google.
find . -path '*/not-these' -prune # This does basically the opposite of what you'd expect it to.
Yes, I know how to do it NOW. Well, Google remembers which page I found most relevant for the search terms that eventually found the right way.
That's because its really difficult to determine what's "Linux" when you're talking about Linux. What works on RHEL/CentOS won't necessarily work exactly the same on Fedora, and will probably be way different than on a Debian box.
Contrast this, however, to one of the BSDs, say FreeBSD, which I am the most familiar with. Let us take a look here: http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html. All of these documents ship with the OS, so if you don't have a network connection (for instance, you need the docs to help you set it up), then you have them there as well. The FreeBSD Handbook covers everything from installation to configuring BGP.
There is a separate Developer's Handbook (which even contains a primer on x86 asm), a Porter's Handbook, etc. The docs that ship with the OS include even The Design and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System, which is somewhat dated at this time, but still a great help in theory.
Then, of course, there are the man pages that everyone always mentions, which are awesome, but don't really help make the point I'm putting forward. Of course, the fact that FreeBSD can ship such thorough documentation is because FreeBSD is FreeBSD anywhere, where "Linux" is not. So, perhaps the problem isn't with "Linux," but with certain distributions not taking documentation seriously enough for the various common tasks and interfaces.
What I'm really getting at is, I should not have to Google around for random blogs and wikis to find out how to do a common task that I may be getting to for the first time, hope that I can find an answer, and that the source can be trusted. Any of the distributions which have any sort of commercial or foundation backing at all, really should just bite the bullet and hire on a few technical writers to actually make proper documentation, and then keep it up-to-date. Hell, even Microsoft updates their online help files, and most tasks in Windows are straight forward enough that only 4th grades and 60 year olds need to ask about it.
Relying on GUI config tools, DHCP, and other magic to keep "newbies" from needing to actually learn anything is counter-productive and isn't going to help create new professionals. "RTFM" shouldn't be a put down or a dirty word, but TFM needs to actually contain TFInformation. Is that really so much to provide?
Perhaps that's because you have only seen Linux (or Gnu) manpages. Take a look at the (Free-)BSD manpages and you will be pleasantly surprised.
Ok, I want to burn a CD, what "man command" should I use?
man pages used to be great. They used to absolutely rule and tell you exactly how to use any part of the system. Now, most things are lacking a man page entirely (man openoffice, man gnome, man kde, man evolution) and the man pages that do exist either tell you nothing or tell you nothing useful.
And, even more ironically, there used to be dozens of desktop manpage viewers, most notably xman from the basic X applications toolset installed on all UNIX and Linux desktops with X. You could even type "man:command" into most Linux browsers and read the manpage. Now none of this exists; it has been TAKEN OUT under the theory that user access to documentation or utilities of this kind is bad for some reason.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I would assume that the average user doesn't use the CLI. Whether in windows or linux, so why should we assume that the average user would even look at man pages. Man firefox? Man calc/writer/impress? Doubt it. Take openoffice for example... let's say I want to create a textbox, so I go to the landing help page for openoffice.org and I'm presented with 4 textboxes,
-Complete Documentation Wiki
-OOo FAQ on the Wiki
-OOo Manuals on the Wiki
-Documentation Website
How is the avg user supposed to know which one to search in and the results are just a output of a google search. It would be nice if it OO.org provided more information or catagorized the output along the lines of tutorials/videos, manuals etc rather just whatever google spits out.
And OO.org is one of the better sites.
Man pages are great to remind you of the details, if you already know how something works.
Man pages are terrible for learning something new for the first time.
My beefs with Unix docs:
1. Forums that are simply copies of other forums with no actual contributions.
2. Installation documentation as the only source for certain unix tools. I don't know how many times I've found Redhat's website insufficient, because it's about how to do an initial install.
3. Too many man pages lack useful examples of how commands options are used and their output. (How hard is it to simply create a few examples?)
4. Invariably someone has asked the question I want answered online, but often that's it. There's no posted answer for the question in many forums/newsgroups--the thread's just left dangling.
5. Stale links and really old revisions of a program clutter/obfuscate searching for solutions.
http://www.beanleafpress.com
You're being a pedantic idiot. That's not what he meant and you know it.
http://xkcd.com/627/
Let's be honest: Documentation of open source programs is generally TERRIBLE. Anything unusual you want to do usually requires a week of experimentation.
It's just horrifically out of date. If you're talking about Linux as in things that are generally applicable to all Linuxes, the Linux Documentation Project (http://tldp.org/) is actually quite well written... but almost everything is uselessly out of date. Most of the articles I've needed in desperate hours of trouble are still written for the 2.4 kernel series. This was especially painful when I was looking into software RAID. There's some great stuff in TLDP, but it's all outdated. At this point, I think gentoo-wiki and ArchLinux's wiki are some of the most helpful places to go if you're using anything that's not .deb or .rpm based.
man pages are written by techs for techs, and are intended more as a reference than as a how to. They're very useful for people who are already familiar with Linux and just need to know the syntax for particular commands, but are not particularly helpful for people just getting into Linux.
Most of the previous attempts to create beginner documentation for Linux and other Open Source projects have suffered from the same basic problems:
1.) Nobody likes writing documentations. Technical people in particular hate writing documentation. It's tedious, boring, and generally unrewarding work. So, documentation tends to be sparse at best.
2.) The people who do bite the bullet and decide to write some documentation misunderstand their audience. They write at their own level, and make it easy for themselves, and perhaps their other technically-minded peers, to understand. Documentation is either very sparse, assuming a level of background knowledge that doesn't exist among beginners, or extremely precise, dense, and difficult to understand.
3.) Nobody reads the documentation anyway. People hate reading documentation almost as much as they hate writing it. When's the last time you bought something and actually read the manual that came with it? Reading documentation is boring and tedious, especially when most of it is so poorly written. People would rather tinker, then ask someone else for help when they break something, rather than slogging through documentation.
The basic result of this is we have two alternating types of stories on a semi-annual basis on Slashdot: Stories about someone trying to start a new Linux documentation effort, and stories about how much Linux documentation sucks. Meanwhile, the state of Linux documentation stays essentially the same: a mix of outdated and difficult to follow documents interspersed with large gaps where no documentation exists at all.
Except it's a really horrible appliance.
Compare it to a Microwave. A Microwave is obvious - it heats up things. There are sometimes lots of buttons, but they're not scary, and if something happens that you don't like, there's a big read "Cancel" button sitting right there. So you're not afraid to play around with it. You'll hit some buttons until it does what you want, and then you'll always hit those same buttons because you know they work. Every time you hit those buttons, your food gets warm in exactly the same manner.
Compare this to a computer. They take time to boot (that's not useful!) and crash. Moreso, when they crash, it's usually not fixed by just unplugging. If you push the wrong buttons on a computer, stuff breaks, and more often than not when stuff on a computer breaks, you can't solve it quickly. Best case you have to wait for it to boot again (it's not doing anything!) and worst-case you have to take it into a repair guy.
Even assuming things don't break, per se, look at all that can go wrong. A Microwave will never try to attack you, but if I miss one button my computer becomes hostile! On a computer I have so many options ... where to save a file? Who knows? I just want to put it somewhere and open it later. Organize? That's hard! What's a directory? Did I put it in "Pictures" or "Documents"? Or is it a Program File? I don't get it.
Now, my Microwave could have a dial on it that lets me control the fan speed. Another dial lets me control the microwave emitter's intensity. I could flip a switch and tune these dials just right, and cook my food just right. Cool! Or I could irradiate things lethally (or not, but it's a metaphor; suspend your imagination a little!) In fact, it's the very lack of options that makes the Microwave useful. I wouldn't judge a person for being too scared to change those dials, nor would I expect everyone to learn how.
To non-technical people, computers must be appliances, and they will prefer the OS and Software Suite that accomplishes this best. Right now that's Windows and Mac. Linux has too many dials. Things can go wrong. The end user cannot have anything go wrong ever. If you want Linux to reach the end-user, Linux has to be a better appliance than Windows or Mac. Some distros are better than others, but there are still way too many degrees of freedom. Software update sites, administrator accounts, audio not working, suspend issues, complex filesystems....
There are answers online for all of these questions. There is documentation for some, forums for others, and wikis for most. However, they all ignore the fact that these are problems that can not exist in a compelling appliance. Adding more documentation will make my job easier, but it will do nothing for a non-technical user.
Personally, the best appliance of all is looking like Chrome OS. And it's Linux!
Manpages suck for the average programmer.
No. Most manpages suck, especially on Linux. Sorry, but it's true. BSD manpages are usually better because they've a legacy of being better (there's a history of them having had a good tech writer spruce them up sometime way back, and that's encouraged them to stay good) whereas too many Linux utils and syscalls are poorly documented (GNU utils because they think you should be using texinfo, Linux syscalls because there's a tendency to say RTFS).
They could be better. Making them better needs effort, and it needs someone other than the original developer to help (because the developer is usually too close to understand what needs to be documented, or at least that's how it is for me). I also advise not worrying about the format of the documentation; plain old text is hugely better than nothing...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
One of the interminable flame wars when GIMP stories run is "If it just had feature XYZ... then I'd switch." Or, the flamebait, "GIMP isn't as good as Photoshop, therefore I'll never use it."
In this case, "If only a Linux distro had more XYZ... then I'd switch." People are stubborn. They will either switch and deal with the learning curve (warts and all) or they won't and they'll start flamebait threads like, "Docs suck..."
Like the GIMP, when some Photoshop feature makes it into the application, (ex. color management) the "If it just had feature XYZ..." comments don't decline and the new users don't come flooding in. Bottom line, there's no amount of documentation that would end the "Docs suck" post.
Do some specific applications need better documentation? Sure, but that's not a Linux-specific problem. Overall, it's a very well documented OS.
I don't know if anyone has mentioned the Gentoo pages, but those are pure gold when I don't know where to start.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
my Ubuntu 9.10 does that too. helpful when I plug in my usb camera too
Openness implies access, understanding, knowledge, transparency. Without documentation, none of these exist.
No, you're conflating two completely different things. Open (as far as software is concerned) refers to access to, and freedom to use and re-use code. Documentation is (regarded as) a boring task required to make code accessible for newbies. Sure, it would be nice if the programmer could do both, but the simple fact is that it is common for competent programmers to lack the requisite communication skills for writing useful documentation.
Protip: Find the software you want, then turn to your package manager. If you have to compile stuff by hand and don't want to, you are not running a suitible distro.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
The man pages are more for learning (you can troubleshoot with them too, but diagnostic info in them are going to be lacking, just like trying to rely on the Windows Help files to fix a busted Exchange connector). Odds are, a beginner/apprentice won't know what to do with 'em for fixing a problem unless he/she is a royal badass at general computing/programming practices.
The fascinating thing about man pages, for me, was how utterly obscure some of them are to beginners. Most of them assume an intermediate understanding of unixy concepts, and don't bother to explain the context of the command -- i.e. when and why you would want to use it in the first place!
The whole experience of learning to use the command line reeked of disdain for those who hadn't been to school (or endless sexless nights in the basement) to study the stuff, and myopia about the fact that someone may be coming at all this from a different angle.
Which I guess is just nerdly, right? what did I expect.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Because almost every application/tool is also found packaged for OS X, BSD, even for Windows....obvious likely exception: the Linux kernel docs. So the article is kind of stupid from that premise onwards. But anyway how about someone offer more than a single example, not just anecdotes, cliches and rants? While remembering tfa is about new(ish) users' experiences?
Assuming a new(ish) user is using a graphical environment means that man pages will not be the first place a user looks. So basically we're looking at the docs specific to the environment (Gnome/Xfce/KDE etc) and the docs of the individual applications. Almost every gui application I've seen has a 'help' button on the menu bar. Some of these launch a help doc in a doc browser, some a locally hosted html doc in the default web browser and some do the evil thing of offering only a web address and assume you are connected...grrrr. Most of the apps I use have very decent help docs. A few don't have anything useful and then again some are models of excellence. I notice the same situation when I use Windows. It's really dumb to say this is some endemic problem with Linux/free software.
If the issue is with stuff like 'how do I set up RAID' or 'how do I install with /home encrypted' then this is up to the distribution to get right. Some are better than others. In Debian there is the online Debian Reference, a reference guide aimed at *users* not developers. This can also be installed and so be accessible without a net connection. It covers all kinds of stuff from the introductory section on the UNIX filesystem hierarchy i.e. what are /etc /home /var and what is the root account, right through to setting up your own subversion repo or customising the kernel.
Occasionally a user might come across an application which is poorly documented, that is there is little documentation or the documentation is inaccurate/outdated/difficult to understand. But why should one or two particular/anecdotal experiences lead to a belief that 'omg linx has bad docs!' It's an overreaction, but I suppose it fills column inches for bloggers/journos and offers the casual blowhard the opportunity for a badly informed whinge post on a board.
Thinking back to the last thing I struggled with: wake on lan. I didn't have a clue what to do to set it up. Searched distro wiki for wake on lan, result being a page of good instructions about which tools to use, how to check my ethernet card supports it, how to enable it, a brief comparison of two different wol clients, lots of examples and other helpful stuff. A few minutes later had it all working. Shocking!
Here's the thing. If you find yourself wanting to read the man pages, and you are confused by them. Go and purchase a copy of "Running Linux." Any edition will do. That's how most of us that *like* Linux learned to use it.
For most users, however, the man pages are just a waste of time. The have no desire to learn to use the various command line flags for "tar," nor do they want to understand the vagaries of cat.
For that matter, they don't want to learn how to create a partition for /home (which is the example used in the original article). The whole idea that the operating system should make this sort of activity accessible to newbies is simply ridiculous. By this standard Mac OSX is *more* difficult to use than Linux, and Windows is completely unusable.
Ubuntu's auto-partitioner gets this absolutely right (while still giving people that want a separate home partition the tools they need).
just put some real-world examples at the beginning of the manpage and you're good...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
I can access help files with a mouse click, too, where it makes sense.
For comparison, open up a Terminal in Mac OS X, and tell me what you find for documentation. In fact, I dare you -- try the same with start->run->cmd on Windows.
If you're already in a commandline environment, man makes sense, and Google makes sense as a way to find out about man. I know of no OS which provides point-and-click help for the commandline, nor can I think of a sane way to do it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
And how the hell is some user sitting alone in his room soupposed to know this? Perhaps if there was a "readmefirst" file on the desktop to give new users this info, but there isn't.
The larger point is that the user cannot do this at all with Windows. How do you mind out what an exe in your process list does there? You Google it!
In my mind, I would expect documentation for Windows to be far superior to that for Linux, because Microsoft can pay technical writers, as can most commercial publishers. But, they don't. Instead, they ship the minimum docs they can and then sell books through MS Press. What's really the difference between that and buying a book through O'Reilly? Not much.
Bottom line is, the whole "Linux has no documentation" argument is a strawman, and I know what strawmen are, because, I myself have made enough of them to feed a thousand cows, for sure. Linux has rough documentation, but so does -everything- else.
This is my sig.
oh, don't get me started.... ALL OS's suck, they just incite different kinds of violent feelings!
MS has always had a central figurehead to vent spleen upon. Linux just gives one a feeling of antipathy towards nerd-dom... unless it's the urge to revenge that comes from a particularly bad man page.
Damn those pesky terrorists
And if you tell that dialog "I want to burn these files to the CD", you'll get a CD that only works on other Windows computers. By default, Windows does not burn CDs in a manner compatible with anything but Windows. That's so much more user friendly than Linux or OSX, because everyone loves the mystery of "why doesn't this CD work on my friend's mac?"
Exactly. There was a moment (between Red Hat 9 and say Fedora 2 or 3, in Red Hat land) when the best of both worlds was present... You COULD use perfectly useful GUI tools to manage things and it was great for end users to have them at that level of functionality, but you COULD also still manage your system with an xterm and vi, adding things to the .xinitrc/.xsession process, using xset to manage power saving, compiling your own kernels and assuming that in most cases it would work with the userland and installing these kernels from a root shell.
Now .xinitrc/.xsession are ignored unless you radically reconfigure things. The GNOME startup is (as you say) not only opaque but dispersed across hundreds of files not only in $HOME but also in /usr (just try to manage your menus without alacarte or change your icons in Do-Docky), the X resources system and classic arguments like -geometry are absolutely useless (you actually have to start apps one by one and hunt down configuration tools in order to affect their behavior).
On top of that, when you compile a kernel, virtually every systemic option threatens to fail to work with your userland. You have to trudge through documentation to see whether or not virtually every other option is necessary for some subsystem, and if you fail, you will not boot (or will not manage to get to your desktop). On top of that, installing a kernel now involves initrd management and questions about whether parts of the userland depend on vendor extensions to the kernel.
Yes, some of this is Red Hat, but it's also typical with ubuntu and SuSE, virtually all of the "leading" distributions.
Those who say "just switch to Slackware" or "just switch to Debian" miss the fact that full current hardware support (which these days is more and more in the userland) requires these updated userlands.
There is no essential reason why userlands these days have to ignore things like -geometry, -xrdb arguments (and the X Resource Database) .xinitrc/.xsession, etc.
It's a philosophical shift toward a monolithic SYSTEM (like Windows) and away from Unix modularity. People used to complain about the monolithic KERNEL. Now dispersed parts of the installation across all of userland are critical. There is virtually no modularity left in the most recent distros.
It's a shame, because I think the parallel mode of thinking (we'll honor old UNIX standards *and* build new user-friendly tools around them) was a much better way to go.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW