I haven't been using them for last 20 years... I still remember how useful they were in my early Linux days in 1999-2002. I will never forget the one about making coffee (http://fotis.home.cern.ch/fotis/Coffee.html). I made the relay circuit built into a power supply and that was so much fun!
But now they are all forgotten. Dead even. Why?
Are they dead? Not completely dead, but there is only one or two people still maintaining the site + HOWTOs (they organize on GitHub and a mailing list currently). But there's simply nobody volunteering to maintain them or write new articles.
Why is that? Because popular things get action and unpopular things don't. HOWTOs aren't popular.
Why is that? Because blogs and the invention of "Q&A sites" made them unnecessary. Before you would use a HOWTO to teach yourself everything about a specific piece of software or technical thing. Now you don't really need to learn an entire thing. You can just google the one question you have, get the answer, and move on. You still don't know how 98% of that thing works, but you fixed your problem. Since this solves most people's problems, they don't see value in taking the time to write an entire HOWTO, which may take weeks to months for a really good HOWTO. Similarly, users don't look for them because nobody's writing them. There is no incentive anymore.
SEO is part of the reason that traffic began being moved towards blogs and Q&A sites. But SEO alone didn't bring about the cultural shift towards snippets of answers. It was simply a new generation that learned tech outside of the old OSS community, and developed their own ways of learning. Just like the old OSS community created their own way of learning different than their previous generation.
AI for machines and humans alike - and it works much better than you might expect.
The whole point of HOWTO's as a documentation format is that they don't try to do this; rather, they address specific user needs. They're somewhat like the "next step" beyond simple Q&A and FAQ collections, and this is where much of their value could still be found.
I absolutely hate both with a passion, but having mentored a fair number of junior developers I respect that some people benefit from them.
It's the same thing with podcasts and audiobooks- I'm the type of person who is fully tuned in, or I am tuned out. Listening to either while driving is completely pointless for me.
Long live text!
Exactly mirroring the decline in the quality of google results.
You want something specific with say 4 words in the query string, convincing google not to drop one of those in basically every result it returns giving you nothing but SEO spam is a lot more difficult than it should be. Tried googling for something you read last week following a link and now can't find again despite it being about something really esoteric?
So yeah you can work around some of the goog breakage with :allintext or putting a + in front of ever term or putting every term in "quotes" but yeah, at the stage where you're the audience for howtos are you doing that? Dunno.
Who is old enough to remember when google was /liked/? Seems like a long time ago now, huh?
Want to really blow people’s minds? The same was true for Facebook.
These products didn’t get big enough to have power to abuse by being unpopular. People loved these products.
Contrast that to Google which was an indispensable tool for any hacker on basically day one, people will forgive a lot from a company that they can't live without.
But many if not most non-techie people ranted and raved about how much they loved Facebook well into the 2010s, even if they started calling it Instagram at some point. The general public (especially lefty coastal public) didn't start taking out all their frustrations with Big Tech in general on Facebook in particular until 2016.
The story that Facebook got Trump elected is absurd (I worked in the abusive behavior / content moderation group then: I was in the room and the press got this one badly wrong), but it was a riveting story and most people seem to still believe it now. Even some Facebook employees in other orgs seemed to believe that FB had failed in not putting its finger on the scales.
As for why anyone would want CEOs of private-sector companies in San Francisco to unilaterally decide who the president is? That is a horrifying thought. I think Big Tech CEOs probably find that a horrifying thought. The fact that they probably could is nightmare fuel enough, and the fact that to my knowledge they don't probably means there is still some Anakin behind the Vader mask.
Sorry for the novel, but this is all going to go into the history books wrong, and it bothers me to be hung for the wrong crime. FB/Google/etc. have blown it many, many times by "moving fast and breaking things" on privacy, letting mid-level product managers do user-hostile shit with inadequate oversight, "warehouse first and ask questions later"-type stuff, any number of things. But it's an emergent property of rapid-cadence metrics-driven product management, not a Bond-villain stoking a mustache.
So to anyone paying attention at that time, it was pretty clear that the level of tech cred should be about the same. It was the same people.
Hell, I'm old enough to remember when altavista.digitial.com was the most amazing thing I'd seen. But the worse Google results today are as good as the average results from that or any other pre-Google search engine.
BSDs are a great example of how this idea isn't actually dead - the FreeBSD Handbook is essentially the greatest HOWTO ever written. But it can only exist because there isn't the Linux levels of software churn. It is frankly absurd bordering on obscene how quickly Linux documentation "rots", this is not normal and it's not the way it has to be. Very very few other platforms experience this to within even an order of magnitude of the rot rate that Linux does.
This is even true of, say, Windows. Most Windows 10 guides from 2018? Still pretty much work even 4 years later. Can you honestly say that Ubuntu 18.04 guides (even LTS, not even rolling release) actually would even be worth a moment's consideration?
This degree of doc rot is not normal. A little less focus on "move quickly and break things", a little less re-implementing the wheel for the Nth time, and a little more focus on proper systems design from the outset really really needs to be a focus, because the doc rot has gotten absurd over the last 8-10 years.
What are you talking about?
For wayland… just don’t use it, I don’t know?
NetworkManager replaced every other networking that came before it, DBus replaced configuration files/CLI tools/UNIX sockets, PolicyKit->polkit replaced standard Unix permissions (and before that PAM, which oddly still exists), filesystem standard changed (/sys/ and /run/ didn't used to be a thing), bluetooth changed, alsa -> pulseaudio -> pipewire. Most hardware and driver specific behavior seems to change, breaking whatever system files, configuration, modules, firmware, etc came before. Video subsystems seem to change like every 5 years.
And systemd isn't just "12 years old", it has been growing (like The Blob) for 12 years. It used to just be an init system. Now it's a network manager, a DNS resolver, a log manager, a credential manager, a login manager, a partition manager (yes, really), a container manager. resolv.conf -> systemd-resolv, fdisk -> systemd partition, syslog -> journald, netrc -> systemd credentials, login/controlkit -> logind, docker -> systemd.
Among the most serious changes is that now you literally have to use systemd for most graphical environments on Linux. To not use systemd, you have to use fake systemd replacement tools, because everything depends on systemd so much now. That's some serious churn.
There are things called LTS and CentOS but this often gets overlooked because anti-linux proponents need to rag on something.
I think another answer is that much of what is covered by the HowTos is now built into the distros themselves; there's no need to learn X Y and Z if you want to do T, as you just select the "LAMP STACK" option in the distro installer.
I had this preconception that Gentoo was ‘complicated’, but the excellent documentation has made everything easy (and I’m coming round to the opinion that Gentoo is actually easier because how it works is so ‘transparent’).
It's been surprisingly stable for me considering everything I throw at it, and much of what I learned has helped diagnose issues with other distros.
One trove that is maintained => https://linuxfromscratch.org/
And one more reason for a late arrival: in 90s there were less people on Linux, they were not able to create all kinds of knowledge bases, so they resorted to a more achievable project of creating HOWTOs, which was meant to be good enough for everyone.
It doesn't help the Ubuntu docs have fallen into total disrepair. Most searches for information there find 6 year old stuff that's no longer relevant. Major sections of manuals have apparently been abandoned.
The bright spot is Arch Linux; that wiki is amazing. I now am adding Arch to most of my search queries even though I have no intention of ever using Arch.
HTML:
https://archlinux.org/packages/community/any/arch-wiki-docs/
raw (but colored) text readable on framebuffer:
https://archlinux.org/packages/community/any/arch-wiki-lite/
Heck, the mess that is systemd and changing your hostfiles or nameserver on newer versions on Ubuntu is baffling with every version having its own quirk. I spent 30-45 mins on something that took 10 seconds in another flavour of Linux the same day.
Windows commands are still largely the same the were 10-20 years ago.
Compared to the 90s where spam was spam and three internet was more for the tech savvy it's changed.
IMHO what is needed is an open, FOSS, royalty-free database-like format for URLs and descriptions NOT intimately connected with the presentation layer (HTML) like RSS.
Open Graph is kinda the start of what to collect per URL.
Then we need browsers to be able to add/delete/update on this database, let you search through it locally, and allow import/export of portions or the entirety of this database.
This is in direct contradiction to today's walled gardens, so it's not ever going to come from FAANG and friends.
https://web.archive.org/web/20101126162900/http://www.google...
This would seem to confirm that advertising ultimately corrupts ad-supported media
First is that documentation has gotten much better. A lot of times a repository will have examples alongside it. Man pages, help menus, and entire statically generated documentation sites have all advanced this quite a bit - and much of what they do share space with what I used to write about. It's worth mentioning that a lot of times, I was writing to a very specific end goal. Documentation sites will usually what you through what I did and then some.
Second is that Linux userlands have diverged a lot. There's not a ton of standardization around userspace tooling, so it makes writing an article (that needs to be updated) an up-hill battle.
Third, Linode and DigitalOcean use these kinds of articles as PR. They're high quality, often versioned, and help users understand broader contexts as well.
So, are they dead? Yes, in a sense. They inspired a lot though, so in that way I think they still live on.
When you decided that you wanted X11, you would need to follow the readme with the understanding that getting it wrong could fry your monitor.
But not for 25 years.
>When you decided that you wanted X11, you would need to follow the readme with the understanding that getting it wrong could fry your monitor.
The usual disclaimer. The defaults worked.
This after fine tuning, as it started with 640x480.
Slackware just has very detailed documentation. :)
Seeing multiple virtual consoles with login prompts on your first PC was a revelation if you had been amazed by the multi-user systems in school labs and assumed PCs were inherently single user.
Maybe Slackware could be used that way too, but I never tried. By the time we started downloading Slackware floppies, we planned to wipe a system and do an HDD based install to get all those extra packages that would never fit in a single floppy.
That you belive that the installers have advanced to "average user" level really misses the point though. The rest of the os is as disjointed and messy as ever.
1. Copypasta that appears on many different websites. Usually the first hits in Google. Usually terrible.
2. Curated, quality material on sites like Linode or Digital Ocean.
3. Blogs from people who actually work with the stuff and have ran into interesting problems/solutions. Can vary but usually pretty good.
4. Distro docs like Arch wiki
https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Emacs-Beginner-HOWTO.html
It's still sorta relevant, I guess...
What a blast from the past.
Which explains why so much of modern software sucks.
(I know about faqs.org, but those are frequently wildly out of date compared with those on rtfm.mit.edu, which seemed to be continously updated.)
EDIT: I just found <http://www-ftp.lip6.fr/pub/doc/faqs/> (and <ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/doc/faqs;type=d>) which seems to be exactly what I am looking for! It has updates until about 2018, which seems reasonable.
Use the -r flag if you're on GNU for easier relative link creation.
There's no ifconfig, netstat, route, iptables, ipchains, I think there was one more. pumpd is dead, isc-dhcpd is probably dead (replaced by systemd-dhcpd).
It's not really recognizable.
Some distros deprecated those tools but they're still alive.
`ipchains` was replaced by `iptables` in the early 2000's I think.
Also I got `isc-dhcp-server` running and kicking just fine. And straight `bind9`. I know `systemd` does both of these but nothing's forcing you to replace it-at least on Debian anyway.
Not everybody uses systemd. There are still a few distros that deliberately don't use it or at least offer their users a choice. I personally have two Linux systems on which precisely nothing has been replaced by any part of systemd.
When was the last time you had to fiddle with anything that systemd deals with though?
ipfwadm
Then, I tried pairing some Bluetooth headphones with a USB dongle that has regressed default firmware. Not only had everything changed, I hadn't even heard of the deprecated programs. The only cli tools I used from memory were "sudo", " dmesg", "grep" and "ln/rm/etc".
The docs say otherwise. Journaled filesystems and SSDs are both noted.
https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/shre...
I wonder why it's so hard to internalize?
edit: even worse, I thought it was opposite, but it actually isn't! memetic effect?
I install Ubuntu these days by building a boot drive using a gui tool, then just clicking my way through the installers. Getting online involves ... typing in my password. In the late 90s I had to figure out AT commands and set up ppp and so on, and getting X11 up and running required config voodoo.
I miss some of it. Not that much though.
There's also the fact that people just consume that kind of content differently nowadays. While it's hard for me to understand, people younger than myself seem to get a lot out of guided video tutorials over text.
I'm not dead yet, and neither are howtos!
At best you get amateurs speaking authoritatively on subjects they've barely scratched the surface of in blog posts they can try monetize, at worst you get the same thing but in the form of a youtube video.
This video is sponsored by SKYN condoms. Get a 6-pack for just $8.99 that you can truly feel.
And now for the red cup with OpenCV.
I’m planning to open my personal trove step by step, on my self hosted server, via a static site. They are Linux/development documents too.
Note: No ads, no tracking, GFDL licensed.
There’s some preliminary stuff I wrote: https://bayindirh.lists.sh/Useful%20technical%20documents
Excellent demonstration of how awful the status quo is vs. opening local files in /usr/share/doc/howto/txt/ with `less`.
Evernote allows me to take notes in real-time and access it regardless of place or OS I'm using at that time. It also allows me to collaborate on stuff, so I don't think it's concentrated evil juice.
They were generally relevant to the versions of software included, and updated when the rest of the system did.
Things started getting messy as everyone got connected 24x7 and increasingly diverged from what packages distros were shipping, and of course the HOWTOs in general just stopped getting maintained/created until we arrived at today's misery.
The latter one is a German wiki that has a similar premise to linuxhowtos.org, but it seems to be much more active and most entries I was looking at were up-to-date. Kinda weird because I consume tech articles and man pages almost exclusively in English – with the big exception of ubuntuusers.de because there doesn't seem to be a good counterpart within the first few Google/kagi results.
I had forgotten about it until seeing your question this morning :)