Comment by IgorPartola
8 years ago
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.