Honestly, as a newbie to Linux I think the ratio of well documented processes vs. âdraw the rest of the fucking owlâ is too damn high.
The rule seems to be that CLI familiarity is treated as though its self-evident. The exception is a ground-up documented process with no assumptions of end user knowledge.
If that could be resolved I think it would make the Linux desktop much more appealing to wider demographics.
That said, Iâm proud to say that Iâve migrated my entire home studio over to linux and have not nuked my system yet. Yet⌠Fortunately I have backups set up.
ExcessShiv@lemmy.dbzer0.com â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
Yeah the documentation (if it even exists) is usually clearly written by people intimately familiar with the project and then never reviewed to make sure it makes sense for people unfamiliar with it.
SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
Relevant xkcd
wick@lemm.ee â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
Bold of you to assume I know how to read!
teft@lemmy.world â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
This is why Technical Writer is a full time job.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
Itâs also why the humanities are important. Stemlords who brag about not doing literature classes write terrible documentation.
AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
âset all environment variablesâ
mesamunefire@lemmy.world â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
More recently its go to discord for the envâŚno joke.
AstralPath@lemmy.ca â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
The mistake is the assumption of a certain level of end user knowledge.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
You have to assume some level of end user knowledge, otherwise every piece of documentation would start with âWhat a computer doesâ and âHow to turn your computer on.â
Iâve found the best practice is to list your assumptions at the top of the article with links to more detailed instructions.
GBU_28@lemm.ee â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
Whyâs that a mistake? Not everything is built for a novice
bl_r@lemmy.dbzer0.com â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
This is why I did a âwalkthrough testâ when I had to write documentation on this sort of thing. Iâm a terrible technical writer, so this shit is necessary for me.
I grabbed my friend who knows enough about computers to attempt this, but not enough about infrastructure to automatically know what I meant when I was too vague.
Took two revisions, but the final document was way easier to follow at the end
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
Thatâs why blog posts rock. Most popular projects will have a dozen blog posts for different configurations. For example, when looking to set up NextCloud, I found docs for almost all combinations of the following:
It does take some knowledge of each of the above if you need one of the few configs thatâs not available on a blog post, and some of the posts are outdated, but with a bit of searching almost everything is documented by someone on the internet.
This shouldnât be necessary (official docs should be more comprehensive), but at least itâs available.
cron@feddit.org â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
Iâd rather have a great documentation than five different blog posts, where some of them might be outdated, wrong or insecure (and you only find out later).
But yes, they are helpful and easily available for popular software.
harsh3466@lemmy.ml â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
Okay, please point me to the blog posts that helped you with collabora/onlyoffice. Thanks have NEVER been able to get that to work with my nextcloud (currently using the Docker AIO).
JackbyDev@programming.dev â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
Reminds me of the time I asked a question about a Magic: The Gathering card tomy local game storeâs Facebook page. The card was Sublime Archangel. I asked what happened if it gave a creature Exalted that already had one. Someone sarcastically replied that it already says it on the card. I was a new player, how was I supposed to parse the phrase âIf a creature has multiple instances of exalted, each triggers separatelyâ? For all I knew that could mean that they didnât stack because they would need to trigger together. I didnât have the vocabulary to understand those things.
I try to remember this when explaining what I might believe are simple concepts to people because that person really upset me.
hperrin@lemmy.world â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
I donât think itâs (just) that. Itâs also a different skill set to write documentation that it is to write code, and generally in these kind of open source projects, the people who write the code end up writing the documentation. Even in some commercial projects, the engineers end up writing the docs, because the higher ups donât see that theyâre different skill sets.
marcos@lemmy.world â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
Thatâs just sloppiness.
The information that familiarity gives you is âWTF does this field meansâ, and itâs the only thing thatâs actually there. How you get a value and how a value is formatted are things no amount of expertise will save you from having to tell the computer, and thus you canât just forget about.
(And let me guess, the software recommended install is a docker image?)