Comment by Xunxi
8 years ago
This is a very interesting project. Years ago when I wanted to learn how to use Linux, my friend who was a system admin at the time just told me to read Man Pages. It was so overwhelming and confusing to say the least, it made me give up on Linux for a long while.
Times have changed and I will definitely love to contribute as well as recommend this project.
I've been using Linux for twenty years and have maybe spent two hours reading man pages. Man pages seem to be written by engineers that honestly wrote them like it was code. It's dense material and assumes you can decipher it.
Since the days of Alta Vista and webcrawler. And even with Google, I skip the first link (man pages) and find a better explanation
Heh. Should have told you to go read the FreeBSD manual. That’s the first OS that made sense to me because of it. I actually ended up translating parts of it to Russian because I enjoyed it so much.
NetBSD was the first thing I got running reliably on my ancient hardware. Linux eventually worked but it was process. And man pages don’t explain what the system does at all.
Of course, as people have pointed out already, a user manual is not a tutorial, and the two are distinct and complementary. This is something that one finds in many spheres, from Microsoft operating systems to Linux ones.
One of the things that MSDN and TechNet doco does is have both "X reference" and "using X" sections. Manual pages are reference doco, in this way of organizing things. The BSD worlds put the "using X" doco into what are often called "handbooks" or "guides".
* NetBSD Guide: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Linux_Guide
For examples and doco that works from the basis of what one usually wants to do, then these handbooks and guides are the places to go, not reference manuals.