Ubuntu Maker Canonical Planning To Vastly Improve Its Documentation

[Vistaus]

I am a Debian user, but the Arch wiki is my favorite go-to for just about anything!

Same here! Deepin user (which is based on Debian), but the Arch wiki is the holy grail when it comes to documentation.

[Vorpal]

Be that as it may, several wikis seem redundant. systemd, pulse, network manager are the same, regardless of the distro that uses them. They should be documented in one place and one place only. Distro wiki should only have to deal with distro specific configurations and other quirks.

While I agree I theory, in practise there are enough distro specific things mixed into a lot of articles, that it would be hard to separate. Not impossible, but a lot of work. Possibly less work over all for everyone, but more work than just documenting your own stuff.

[CommunityMember]

Good (or at a minimum adequate) documentation is typically expected (and sometimes used as a purchase requirement) by those that pay for a license for enterprise software (even if some enterprises will choose to just open a support ticket rather than reading the docs themselves). Since the real money (for Canonical) is enterprise support contracts someone must have finally decided that they did not want to have less than good documentation being a sales impediment. And better documentation, for whatever reason generated, is good for all.

[kpedersen]

As primarily a BSD user, the Arch Wiki is still a really good source of information for configuration of software.

I would personally prefer something a little more "set in stone" than a wiki however. Perhaps just a read-only yearly dump of it could satisfy that. Then it could remain useful for legacy (or even non-cutting edge) versions of software.

[macemoneta]

As primarily a BSD user, the Arch Wiki is still a really good source of information for configuration of software.

I would personally prefer something a little more "set in stone" than a wiki however. Perhaps just a read-only yearly dump of it could satisfy that. Then it could remain useful for legacy (or even non-cutting edge) versions of software.

Arch is very good at documentation. As Fedora/Centos Stream/Red Hat are commercially oriented, that's exactly what they do. Their documentation is versioned for each release. For example: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/docs/

[brucethemoose]

This is bigger than it seems, as right now, if one searches "Do X Ubuntu," you either get ancient stackexchange/forum posts, SEO spam sites, or (if you're lucky) Arch Wiki or a man page.

[jacob]

That's all well and good, and I applaud them for doing this. But if all their documentation directs people to 'install snap x' then it isn't going to be useful outside of Ubuntu. If it's general purpose and doesn't mention snaps too much it could be good.

The Ubuntu documentation should be written to be as useful as possible in Ubuntu. If the easiest solution for a problem in Ubuntu is to install snap xyz then that's exactly what it should say

[Mez']

From the operational end user (client or internal) to the business analyst to the functional analyst to the developer, passing by the project manager, whether it's code, processes, procedures, design, wiki, user manual, etc... isn't it what we're all trying to do at some point? Documenting.
Even if you can manage a decent amount of documentation at a defined moment, the issue always ends up being the same: keep on documenting over the years so that changes are reflected when they occur. And that's where it almost always goes wrong.

[F.Ultra]

Well if going by the LTT video and how apparently Windows refugees do things, you can no longer write documentation since that implies using a terminal, now a days you are forced to create YouTube videos instead showing users where to click and when.

[bug77]

Arch is very good at documentation. As Fedora/Centos Stream/Red Hat are commercially oriented, that's exactly what they do. Their documentation is versioned for each release. For example: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/docs/

Arch's wiki is also nicely versioned. For the only "release" they have