I gained the skills to become a Systems Admin when I was 17 by reading and following HOWTOs. I keep telling myself I will start writing new HOWTOs and publish them there, because the blog-spam instructions of today make it take 10x longer to get things done. Would anybody else write new HOWTOs?
Same here. With those HOWTOs I was able to learn networking from scratch in home without actually having internet connection. Good times :)
> Would anybody else write new HOWTOs?
I always wanted to, but because I'm not native English speaker I was always afraid to publish anything.
Still i think it could be very beneficial - especially that we all observed dozen of forums and websites just vanished over the last decade or two, but those documents are available to all as simple Linux package.
Barely anybody will care about your English if you'll write about something people want to know about, or if you're just sharing your passion. I publish bunch of technical writings ad hoc, just because I like to share about something I worked on with Pinephone (https://xnux.eu/) and other things, and nobody ever commented about the language.
I’d encourage you to go ahead and not let your worries about command of Englsh hold you back. The best thing about the Internet is that it allows people to work together and improve each other’s work. E.g., I’m a better editor than I am a writer and I’ve had a few patches accepted for fixing the English in the README of useful projects.
Yeah, if you do a web search on nearly everything you find articles by people who know what they are doing and a bunch of articles that seem to be, more or less, copies of the original articles by those who really know there stuff. It doesn’t seem like search engines necessarily reward quality or up-to-date how-to’s but maybe that’s a really difficult for search engines to discern high quality content from okay content. It seems like okay content rises to the top if there’s a lot of it.
I usually look at at least two sources for cross referencing and can find how to do just about anything, though I trust some sources to get it right most of the time. Digital Ocean has done a good job of developing a strong set of how-To’s for nuts and bolts things you might want to do on a VPS (aka droplet).
Beyond that, I just do web searches and if a couple respectable looking sites agree on something, I tend to trust it. It’d be cool if there really were sort of a clearing house of curated list of the top Linux how to sites out there with sites that get abandoned sort of identified as such kind of like a repo that’s not being updated. Abadoneware is an issue but abandoned how to websites are super common. It’s hard to keep writing and keeping a site current year after year so it’s not surprising.
As someone who’s written documentation, I know how hard it is to write a good how to. To really write a good how to you have to really understand what you’re writing about and actually run through it to make sure your instructions work and are clear to the reader. Hat’s off to anyone who writes real docs not just cobbling together content for SEO and letting it stagnate.
Anyway, are there any curated clearinghouses with links to the best maintained sets of howtos on different things such as commands, scripting, sys admin, and just articles on how to be more efficient on Linux?
