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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 We've discussed before some of open source's documentation being out of date.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.
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
I find man pages to be poorly written, and difficult to understand most of the time. I tend to use google to find people who are discussing it in plain english...
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.
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?
I've been a Linux user since 1993 and the state of Linux documentation today is worse than ever before if you don't happen to be an actual coder on a specific project reading project documentation for it in order to facilitate your work and contributions.
Back in the day, there were manpages, info pages, comprehensive documentation at /usr/doc or /usr/share doc for specific packages, and documentation files in nearly every source directory that you compiled yourself. You could also pick up just about any book on UNIX (System V Bible for SysV-like distros, or various BSD books) and apply much of what was said to Linux as well.
Everything was well-understood and common to the general state of things in the UNIX world and if you didn't understand something, a quick apropos/man or info or visit to /usr/doc or /usr/share/doc would result in enlightenment.
I'm a Red Hat/Fedora user since Red Hat 4 (Slackware before that) and as a 25-year UNIX veteran, I often feel like I have no idea what's going on in (for example) the init process, X configuration, desktop management, app resources/configuration, etc. Where are the dotfiles located? Where are the /etc components? What are the command-line arguments? Where are the manual pages? What documentation does exist is generally in the awful "Help Tool" format (click Help -> Help Contents in an application window and get a lot of prose for beginners). This documentation typically offers NO INFORMATION beyond the navigation of the user interface for the application. Nothing on system resources, locations of configuration files, dependencies, APIs, command line arguments, or anything that would allow you to either troubleshoot or modularly re-use the software item in question.
The system-level stuff (PackageKit, PolicyKit, SELinux, Udev, HAL, Plymouth etc. etc.) does not offer any clear location for configuration and typing for example "man selinux" brings up a couple of paragraphs with no detail. It refers to a pile of other manual pages, none of them installed by default. There is no overview. And SELinux is probably the most transparent of all of these.
The desktop is completely unmanageable if something breaks; the dotfiles are not in any concise location. gconf-editor is not installed by default and even after you do install it, there's no documentation on the options that it contains. It's not clear how to cause a command to execute on startup. You can go to GNOME startup options in a menu through which you have to use a GUI program to "add" things to the startup process, but the environment that's being configured for the processes spawned this way is not documented and many attempts to execute commands using this method fail.
More and more it seems as though I am constantly using find and grep either in all dotfiles in a directory or as root through the entire /etc, /usr/share, and /usr/lib directories to identify through keywords or binary strings either binaries or text files relevant to tasks I want to accomplish, then paging through them or opening the binaries up in a hex editor to try to grok what I need to change through sheer intuition.
Yes, I suspect there is documentation "out there" somewhere, but spending an hour trying to Google where it is located in each instance is an hour that I already don't have and that now can't go toward actually reading and grokking the documentation in question. But it appears to be just too much to provide easy directions to the technical documentation that exists, if it exists, in each case.
There is a definite ethos of "try to hide the system from the user" that has emerged in Linux and it does not make me happy, as is obvious here. I now spend several days each Fedora upgrade trying to bang my personal system into the shape I want it to be in. It used to be really simple to upgrade, and it was one of the greatest things about Linux. Just tr
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
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.
Worse, it's responses like the GP's that compounds the problem.
Noob: I don't know how to use Linux! Won't someone help me?
BOFH: *grumble*grumble* Look, here's the "man" command, dumbass. It obviously means "MANual". Get it? Figured you looked too stupid to figure out how to use Linux...
Noob: Um... when I type that, all I get is "What manual page do you want?" How do-
BOFH: Why you rotten little... just how stupid ARE you? Were you born and raised with Windows or something? You type in the command, kernel function, or standard library call in after "man", just like we've done for the past TWENTY FUCKING YEARS OF UNIX. Hello? Have you been paying ANY attention at all, you worthless little Windows runt? If I hear you badmouthing one of the most hallowed and revered of Unix commands again, I'll-
Noob: So... er... what man command do I use to learn how to burn a CD?
BOFH: (eyes starting to turn red, veins now starting to pop out of head, teeth clenching almost to the point of shattering them by the pressure) You... were... asking... about... MANPAGES... YOU... STUPID... ASSHOLE! What the fuck is WRONG with you? You don't use man to burn a CD! Where the hell were you raised? In Redmond? I bet you don't even know what revision of the CD filesystem to use to optimize storage and retain symlinks! As everyone ALREADY KNOWS, ASSHAT, you have to build up an ISO image from on-filesystem objects using the proper options for your image of choice, make sure the appropriate kernel options are compiled in (or, of course, make and install the proper modules via modprobe or insmod, or via the autoloading mechanism which ONLY the uneducated scum use because they don't know the glories of "pure" Linux from ten or so years ago, the stupid "modern" bastards), THEN you can "burn a CD", as you so quaintly put it! WHAT PART OF THIS IS NOT OBVIOUS TO YOU?!?
Noob: I...
BOFH: (starting to shake from pure rage) You're clearly too much of a moron to truly enjoy Linux! GET OUT! GET OUT OF MY SIGHT, WINDOWS USER! OUT! AND TAKE YOUR GODDAMNED "PRETTY" GUI WITH YOU!
Noob: Hey, guess what? In the time it took you to rant about all that, I got my CD burned under Windows and didn't have a raving insular lunatic insult me. And I was able to do it without having to study the history of an operating system. Sounds like I'm using Windows from now on.
BOFH: *sniff* Why don't people like Linux? We're so superior!