After spending many hours today with a problem with Java I have found the oracle instructions for installation of Linux to be incomplete compared to some random stranger on the internet. Take a look at the difference. I will admit I am a noob with Linux and I really only know the basic commands by heart. Hopefully in my CS studies I will understand the heart of Linux but why do some guides suck for us new people?
A lot of official documentation for Linux is written for those who have a working knowledge of Linux. That is to say, someone who is comfortable with using Linux as their daily driver. This doesn't mean they do, they would just be relatively comfortable doing so.
This assumption leaves a lot of the newbies in the dark and forced to forage through pages and pages of forum responses to find the one particular case that might apply to exactly what you're trying to do.
It's truly a pain in the ass when you're having an issue where the fix is SO obvious, that anybody who's had the issue previously hasn't bothered to make a forum post about it. This is because you're just forgetting a certain aspect of your system that you configured a certain way, etc. I mention this because I had one like it where I couldn't run MC on Wayland with GNOME.
I read both, and surprisingly I had Mint and currently have Fedora and they both seem very clear to me, granted in the 4 months I've had Linux, I've installed/uninstalled the OS at least 20x and out of the 20x at least 10x through the Terminal. Linux takes time and repetition to grasp, I've also read a couple of books on Command line functionality. Don't worry, over time things will make sense.
technically, that 3rd party you are mentioning is basically the community. The IRC channels or places like stackoverflow, forums and man pages. It's hard some times, but there are places like this forum for that same purpose. Feel free to ask people or post threads here as well. You never know who can help
Man pages,man, man pages. Any time I don't understand how a command works, I man that shit up (man foo)! Otherwise, if I want to find a command that will do something, another command that's useful is apropos [Search String]. This will help you find a command that matches certain words that are involved in what you're attempting to do.
Lastly, when you're trying to find a certain package in your repos, but you either can't remember the name or you're looking for something new/similar compared to what you already have, you can do apt-cache search [string]</code]
You've got it exactly right. I know the man pages can be a little gibberish, but with all I know today about Linux, I haven't taken one course or spent one cent on anything for it.
To put it short, I've used a lots of Linuxes on lots of different machines. Laptops, desktops, Raspberry Pi, even installed Puppy on a PS3, that was fun. I use Arch as my daily driver. I'm not trying to brag here, just demonstrate that you don't need to spend a cent to learn all this stuff. I just dove in head first and with the help of the online documentation (as scarce in detail as it can be) and online forums, it just gets the job done.
TL;DR separation of concerns (or bad management when it's lacking)
We have people in our big computer company who cary a job title of "Tech Writer", if I had to make up a generic stereotype they're like artsy/hipstery computer scientists and you can tell when talking to them they use lots of colorful adjectives in their speech. (I guess the term is well-read).
Even though regular "hard core-ish scruffy coder type" software engineers write most of the actual content, having tech writers around to focus on, own, and be responsible for making sure docs are in good shape ends up making docs an actual feature of whatever is the software product (and docs are then good!)
To summarize, as long as you have someone who takes pride in their work on documentation, documentation will be good; conversely. people who write the software in question take pride in the software they write, and their documentation usually sucks (until it's edited by a third party).
but only dummies would use it my pun game is strong tonight i can feel it
side note, windows is the same. the people who are total windows noobs never find their way here, so we dont see them much except out in the wild, BUT THEY EXIST! one of the funniest tech stories of mine is about a relative who didnt know how ot turn off caps lock and only spoke in all caps for months.