[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Are Linux HowTos dead? Why?
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Ask HN: Are Linux HowTos dead? Why?
Somehow it just got me: Linux HowTos haven't been created or maybe
even updated since ca. 2007. https://www.linuxhowtos.org/ I
haven't been using them for last 20 years... I still remember how
useful they were in my early Linux days in 1999-2002. I will never
forget the one about making coffee
(http://fotis.home.cern.ch/fotis/Coffee.html). I made the relay
circuit built into a power supply and that was so much fun! But
now they are all forgotten. Dead even. Why?
Author : piotrke
Score : 51 points
Date : 2022-08-13 20:59 UTC (2 hours ago)
| samsquire wrote:
| If you want high quality resources and skill and talent, you need
| to pay for it. I don't think Linux HowTos was a paid service such
| as lwn.net
| dcminter wrote:
| I think the simple answer is that distributions got a whole bunch
| of polish and automation.
|
| I install Ubuntu these days by building a boot drive using a gui
| tool, then just clicking my way through the installers. Getting
| online involves ... typing in my password. In the late 90s I had
| to figure out AT commands and set up ppp and so on, and getting
| X11 up and running required config voodoo.
|
| I miss some of it. Not that much though.
| throwaway892238 wrote:
| The linked site isn't where most HOWTOs were kept; they resided
| at https://tldp.org/
|
| Are they dead? Not _completely_ dead, but there is only one or
| two people still maintaining the site + HOWTOs (they organize on
| GitHub and a mailing list currently). But there 's simply nobody
| volunteering to maintain them or write new articles.
|
| Why is that? Because popular things get action and unpopular
| things don't. HOWTOs aren't popular.
|
| Why is that? Because blogs and the invention of "Q&A sites" made
| them unnecessary. Before you would use a HOWTO to teach yourself
| everything about a specific piece of software or technical thing.
| Now you don't really need to learn an entire thing. You can just
| google the one question you have, get the answer, and move on.
| You still don't know how 98% of that thing works, but you fixed
| your problem. Since this solves most people's problems, they
| don't see value in taking the time to write an entire HOWTO,
| which may take weeks to months for a really good HOWTO.
| Similarly, users don't look for them because nobody's writing
| them. There is no incentive anymore.
|
| SEO is part of the reason that traffic began being moved towards
| blogs and Q&A sites. But SEO alone didn't bring about the
| cultural shift towards snippets of answers. It was simply a new
| generation that learned tech outside of the old OSS community,
| and developed their own ways of learning. Just like the old OSS
| community created their own way of learning different than their
| previous generation.
| musicale wrote:
| Google/copy/paste/repeat is the quick and mindless replacement
| for read/understand/write/debug.
|
| It works pretty well for AI and humans apparently.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Before you would use a HOWTO to teach yourself everything
| about a specific piece of software or technical thing.'
|
| The whole point of HOWTO's as a documentation format is that
| they don't try to do this; rather, they address specific user
| needs. They're somewhat like the "next step" beyond simple Q&A
| and FAQ collections, and this is where much of their value
| could still be found.
| stop50 wrote:
| Except for a few programs like ss or nftables nothing has
| changed. you can still use shred, despite the usage of journaled
| filesystems, cp works like 20 years ago and nothing has changed
| with ln and i make still errors with the target and the source.
| so the old howtos are still valid.
| raggi wrote:
| ln works just like cp.
|
| Use the -r flag if you're on GNU for easier relative link
| creation.
| willnonya wrote:
| This is misleading, plenty has changed and Linux backwards
| compatibility is horrendous on a good day.
| toast0 wrote:
| The whole networking userspace is changed.
|
| There's no ifconfig, netstat, route, iptables, ipchains, I
| think there was one more. pumpd is dead, isc-dhcpd is probably
| dead (replaced by systemd-dhcpd).
|
| It's not really recognizable.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| ALSA, sysV init, xf86config ramdac settings... and a million
| other things, not just networking
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Stackoverflow et al probably win the search results. The
| landscape is also too diverse to write a howto that would be very
| broadly applicable.
| teddyh wrote:
| What I miss more is the "rtfm.mit.edu" FTP site, which was a
| repository for all the FAQ's of all the Usenet newsgroups. I
| don't even know if it was mirrored anywhere.
|
| (I know about faqs.org, but those are frequently wildly out of
| date compared with those on rtfm.mit.edu, which seemed to be
| continously updated.)
| progbits wrote:
| Not hard to find:
|
| https://archive.org/details/ftp_rtfm.mit.edu_2014.07
|
| https://ftp.sunet.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/usenet/...
| teddyh wrote:
| Nice, thanks! Now, assuming that at least some FAQ's kept
| updating even after 2015, where do these new FAQ's get
| collected?
|
| EDIT: I just found <http://www-ftp.lip6.fr/pub/doc/faqs/>
| (and <ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/doc/faqs;type=d>) which seems to
| be exactly what I am looking for! It has updates until about
| 2018, which seems reasonable.
| pxc wrote:
| The best Linux HOWTOs I ever read were all in print magazines
| about Linux. Those that are still around still do them!
| benjaminpv wrote:
| While formal HOWTOs might not get much attention, it's pretty
| clear Linux tutorials of all types are both being made and
| consumed in a variety of media. People often bring up how much
| value they get out of the articles DigitalOcean puts together,
| for instance. Those aren't HOWTOs necessarily, but does it
| matter?
|
| There's also the fact that people just consume that kind of
| content differently nowadays. While it's hard for me to
| understand, people younger than myself seem to get a lot out of
| guided video tutorials over text.
| HankB99 wrote:
| Bad SEO I suppose. When I search for something, I often get a
| page by some "expert" in which the information is wrong, commands
| don't work and so on. I wish I could figure out how to eliminate
| them from my search results. The worst part is that it is usually
| impossible to contact the author and point out the errors. Like
| they would care.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I think there is a law in India mandating everyone to open a
| blog and explain linux to people. This must be done in the
| first 3 months of learning linux.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| This is certainly true for RaspberryPi tutorials about
| interfacing with thermometers or other sensors. All the DHT-11
| tutorials seem like minor mods of some long lost original,
| except with new spelling mistakes, and inaccurate pinouts.
|
| This would seem to confirm that advertising ultimately corrupts
| ad-supported media
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| The YouTube videos are better because they need it to work on
| screen.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Videos are slow, and it's hard to re watch tricky pieces or
| compare with other sources.
| hanble wrote:
| Unfortunately you're probably right. SEO optimized pages have
| basically taken over most search results, even when they have
| glaring mistakes :(
| akkartik wrote:
| Bad OSE (optimizations on the part of the search engine), you
| mean.
| DelightOne wrote:
| If we could get the search results from a couple years ago,
| without the SEO.
| rob_c wrote:
| Let's be honest Google is having a problem dealing with
| actual intelligence writing bad stuff as well as surgical
| intelligence rehashing things. Just because half the internet
| writes a thing doesn't make it true. And again just because
| the airport writes it doesn't mean it's tested. Figuring that
| out by raw ML and no context of the material is probably not
| going to end well. I think the only solution is will be to
| keep an updated truth curated by experts humans.
|
| Compared to the 90s where spam was spam and three internet
| was more for the tech savvy it's changed.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Full-Internet search is dead. Collect and share bookmarks.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Webrings rise once again
| davidhaymond wrote:
| So we basically need to go back to the days when Yahoo! was
| simply a directory of links to cool websites. Curated by
| humans.
| makapuf wrote:
| Dmoz ftw!
| alexott wrote:
| Imho, the reason for it is that now we have much more sources of
| information. How tos were a concentrated pieces of information
| distributed with Linux distributions or via slow mediums... 20+
| years ago I was involved 8th Russian translation of many how to's
| and they were used because there were no other sources of
| information, but now you can just translate almost any page to
| language that you need
| [deleted]
| larrydag wrote:
| Personally I believe Linux has matured to a pretty decent
| usability level for the average user. Ubuntu, Opensuse, Linux
| Mint and some of the like have taken a lot of the hard work out
| of managing and installing a linux OS. It used to be that you
| would slave hours of getting your specific hardware to work with
| a particular flavor of Linux. Now you have drivers that are
| plentiful and up to date, bugs that get fixed fast, and large
| communities at near enterprise levels maintaining the updates.
| Frankly a pretty good time to be a Linux user.
| l33t2328 wrote:
| Are there any, I don't know, archives of what it used to be
| like to install linux? My first linux experience was Ubuntu
| maybe a decade so ago and it installed fine.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Enjoy,
|
| https://www.linux.co.cr/distributions/review/1994/0703-b.htm.
| ..
| willnonya wrote:
| While the Linux installers and hardware support have improved
| more than any other part of Linux distros hardware support
| still lags well behind actual hardware availability.
|
| That you belive that the installers have advanced to "average
| user" level really misses the point though. The rest of the os
| is as disjointed and messy as ever.
| zaat wrote:
| Not an answer to why it is dead, but the Archlinux wiki, which
| offers decent replacement for the functional part of the
| traditional HOWTOs, have been around since 2005 and have
| established itself as a decent info source for Linux users at
| large, not just the arch initiates.
| worg wrote:
| Second ArchWik it's quite good and not tied to archlinux
| bluedino wrote:
| Linux community documentation falls into a few categories:
|
| 1. Copypasta that appears on many different websites. Usually the
| first hits in Google. Usually terrible.
|
| 2. Curated, quality material on sites like Linode or Digital
| Ocean.
|
| 3. Blogs from people who actually work with the stuff and have
| ran into interesting problems/solutions. Can vary but usually
| pretty good.
|
| 4. Distro docs like Arch wiki
| pyrophane wrote:
| I think at this point the Arch Wiki has supplanted all other
| sources as the definitive source of Linux howtos, given the size
| of the community and its values.
| elaus wrote:
| Personally, I get almost all my Linux "how-tos" from either
| Stackoverflow or, for more basic questions, ubuntuusers.de.
|
| The latter one is a German wiki that has a similar premise to
| linuxhowtos.org, but it seems to be much more active and most
| entries I was looking at were up-to-date. Kinda weird because I
| consume tech articles and man pages almost exclusively in English
| - with the big exception of ubuntuusers.de because there doesn't
| seem to be a good counterpart within the first few Google/kagi
| results.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Mostly because Linux is 'good enough' for most use cases out of
| the box nowadays. Between Ubuntu, Debian and a bunch of other
| distros there is one out there for everybody with most of the
| stuff that you'd need a howto for in the past working out of the
| box. This is a positive development imo.
| xd wrote:
| Everything got to complex.. way to many variables for even the
| simplest of jobs these days.
| indymike wrote:
| The site is dead because of lack of maintenance and everyone
| hosting their own how-to content on their github, podcast,
| youtube, website and Q&A site. If this was re-imagined, it might
| be an aggregator that served as a directory to all the howto
| content...
| Rackedup wrote:
| Yeah it's been a while since I consulted a leggit HOWTO... I
| think that HOWTOs get created by volunteers all over the web
| nowadays.
| pengaru wrote:
| Practically nobody writes classic HOWTOs anymore.
|
| At best you get amateurs speaking authoritatively on subjects
| they've barely scratched the surface of in blog posts they can
| try monetize, at worst you get the same thing but in the form of
| a youtube video.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| I dunno IMHO there's a lot of rose colored glasses looking back
| at them. I cut my teeth learning Linux in the era of howtos and
| such of the late 90s/2000s, and it was a real mess. Someone on
| an IRC channel would tell you to RTFM and point at a guide,
| you'd read it and slog through pages and pages of bloviation
| about unix philosophy, incredible minutia about every CLI
| parameter (half of which don't exist anymore) or whatever and
| be even more confused than when you started. You'd go back to
| IRC and someone else would say oh yeah don't read that guide,
| it's old and not up to date. Here read this guide... and the
| process starts over again. There were some good guides, but it
| was really hard to find them and sort out the good from the
| bad.
| pengaru wrote:
| I spent my teens installing linux from floppies and Infomagic
| CDs. Back then the distro would often by default include the
| howtos package bringing in the whole enchilada of knowledge.
|
| They were generally relevant to the versions of software
| included, and updated when the rest of the system did.
|
| Things started getting messy as everyone got connected 24x7
| and increasingly diverged from what packages distros were
| shipping, and of course the HOWTOs in general just stopped
| getting maintained/created until we arrived at today's
| misery.
| zbird wrote:
| Or a podcast.
| la64710 wrote:
| We should revive the HOWTOs ..
| guestbest wrote:
| Until HowTo's get sponsorship, like streaming, that is how it
| is going to be. Not that enough people RTFM to make it
| worthwhile. The best way to explain Linux is socially, though.
| zbird wrote:
| The best way to learn a subject is from an authoritative
| source. 'socially' results in a whole bunch of misinformation
| and wrong practices, like PHP developers chmod'ing 777 the
| hell out of the system because they don't understand what the
| fuck they are doing.
| ge96 wrote:
| In today's OpenCV video, we'll show you how to find the red cup
| just like the docs.
| zbird wrote:
| Make sure to smash that Like and subscribe and button.
|
| This video is sponsored by SKYN condoms. Get a 6-pack for
| just $8.99 that you can truly feel.
|
| And now for the red cup with OpenCV.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| Nah, real linux hackers go raw.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Honestly, I still write them. Either for my private documents
| or office documents.
|
| I'm planning to open my personal trove step by step, on my self
| hosted server, via a static site. They are Linux/development
| documents too.
|
| Note: No ads, no tracking, GFDL licensed.
|
| There's some preliminary stuff I wrote:
| https://bayindirh.lists.sh/Useful%20technical%20documents
| pengaru wrote:
| The linked Evernote pages don't even render here (noscript).
| Following a long delay it just shows a blank page.
|
| Excellent demonstration of how awful the status quo is vs.
| opening local files in /usr/share/doc/howto/txt/ with `less`.
| hwers wrote:
| Same. Things are getting so noisy and hard to find that even
| if good howtos exist somewhere on the internet, finding it
| can waste hours vs just word searching your own documents.
| maven29 wrote:
| Limiting the search to github gists as a first option is a
| pretty decent way to escape the machine generated algorithmic
| SEO garbage.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Digital Ocean's guides are IMHO the spiritual successor:
| https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| The state of Linux docs as seen through Google is appalling.
| Searing for things like "how to set up rsnapshot backups" are
| full of garbage articles that are 800 words like whose only
| actual content is "apt install rsnapshot". Maybe this is a Google
| problem.
|
| It doesn't help the Ubuntu docs have fallen into total disrepair.
| Most searches for information there find 6 year old stuff that's
| no longer relevant. Major sections of manuals have apparently
| been abandoned.
|
| The bright spot is Arch Linux; that wiki is amazing. I now am
| adding Arch to most of my search queries even though I have no
| intention of ever using Arch.
| jzawodn wrote:
| Wow. This post reminded me that I wrote a HOWTO 20+ years ago:
|
| https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Emacs-Beginner-HOWTO.html
|
| It's still sorta relevant, I guess...
|
| What a blast from the past.
| zbird wrote:
| People don't read anymore these days.
|
| Which explains why so much of modern software sucks.
| docandrew wrote:
| Eh, I'd argue the opposite: developers expect the end-user to
| rely on Stack Overflow or perusing GitHub issues to figure
| out how to use their product, instead of making easy-to-use
| products.
| kodah wrote:
| I used to write articles like this for my blog. There's a reason
| they really don't exist anymore:
|
| First is that documentation has gotten much better. A lot of
| times a repository will have examples alongside it. Man pages,
| help menus, and entire statically generated documentation sites
| have all advanced this quite a bit - and much of what they do
| share space with what I used to write about. It's worth
| mentioning that a lot of times, I was writing to a very
| _specific_ end goal. Documentation sites will usually what you
| through what I did and then some.
|
| Second is that Linux userlands have diverged a lot. There's not a
| ton of standardization around userspace tooling, so it makes
| writing an article (that needs to be updated) an up-hill battle.
|
| Third, Linode and DigitalOcean use these kinds of articles as PR.
| They're high quality, often versioned, and help users understand
| broader contexts as well.
|
| So, are they dead? Yes, in a sense. They inspired a lot though,
| so in that way I think they still live on.
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(page generated 2022-08-13 23:00 UTC)