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NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

New to Debian (Or Linux in general)? Ask your questions here!

NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

Debian Wiki
7
25%
Other resources on Debian.org
3
11%
Arch Wiki
6
21%
Blogs/online guides (not forums.debian.net)
5
18%
YouTube
5
18%
Books/e-books
2
7%
 
Total votes: 28

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steve_v
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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#21 Post by steve_v »

Hallvor wrote: 2023-02-01 09:10canci and myself are, despite having "section moderator" under our handle/name, just regular users outside our domain, so there is no policing involved at all. donald is the only one in this thread with any power, and I don't see him telling you what you can and can't do.
It wasn't your comments, or canci's for that matter that yanked my chain. It was this gem:
donald wrote: 2023-01-31 00:24Just like the Free Hardware tread some are just here to agitate rather than contribute. :oops:
From where I'm sitting, "just here to agitate [how embarrassing]" comes across as a rather passive-aggressive euphemism for "he's just trolling", an activity no more present here than it is in the mentioned "free hardware" (and/or split discussion) thread.
From what I can see, what really occurred was a bunch of people raising quite rational concerns around the (IMO gratuitously onerous given the context) proposed rules for donors, and donald continuing to push the clearly unpopular idea that people giving gear away should cover any incidental costs.
Why that needed to be dragged over here in the first place I don't know, you'll have to ask him.
As for tone police, defending a comment like that with "but slightly douchy tone" is, well, a bit of a stretch IMO. TBH I'm probably just sensitised to such from... earlier interactions with a certain admin.

For the rest, I agree. Had accusations of "agitating" been left out, I likely wouldn't even be here, because I don't have any better ideas on how to get the data you're after.

Hallvor wrote: 2023-02-01 09:10how can we find out what non-forum resources new members use the most? Any ideas?
Well I sure can't make people participate in a poll if they don't want to, and I can't turn the general observation that an awful lot of people seem to prefer step-by-step guides on random blogs over reading the official documentation into a statistically significant survey either. That's just my impression, but if I were to hazard a guess at which way this could have gone with enough participants, that would be it.
Unfortunately, making proverbial horses drink remains as challenging as it ever was. All I can offer is how I learned, and that was primarily this very forum, the debian wiki, offline manual pages, and the contents of /usr/share/doc.
Last edited by steve_v on 2023-02-01 10:07, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#22 Post by kedaha »

Hallvor wrote: 2023-02-01 09:10 Not enough people have answered this poll to give any useful statistical data (reliability). The problem still stands - how can we find out what non-forum resources new members use the most? Any ideas?
If I may be permitted a tongue-in-cheek comment?
Maybe the survey should have been posted in Sid's Playpen for Debian Unstable and Testing, where perhaps more of them hang out? :wink:
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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#23 Post by donald »

kedaha wrote: 2023-02-01 10:06
Hallvor wrote: 2023-02-01 09:10 Not enough people have answered this poll to give any useful statistical data (reliability). The problem still stands - how can we find out what non-forum resources new members use the most? Any ideas?
If I may be permitted a tongue-in-cheek comment?
Maybe the survey should have been posted in Sid's Playpen for Debian Unstable and Testing, where perhaps more of them hang out? :wink:
Good idea, it tends to get a lot of questions and I am curious on the backend of how they find resources as there are not a lot of SID specific forums on-line.
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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#24 Post by Fossy »

Why not consider spinning up this forum into two separate forums , a Debian STABLE user forum and a pure Debian SID forum ?
Does not only satisfy both parties , but may well end up attracting more new " normal " c.q. Debian Stable users to this forum ?
By the way , think-through this a snapshot ;
Who is online
In total there are 54 users online :: 4 registered, 2 hidden and 48 guests (based on users active over the past 3 minutes)
Most users ever online was 1726 on 2021-06-07 06:19
Statistics
Total posts 690872 • Total topics 100732 • Total members 43935 • Our newest member Moranjiang
Poll ... ?
ASUS GL753VD / X550LD / K54HR / X751LAB ( x2 )
Bookworm12.5_Cinnamon / Calamares Single Boot installations
Firefox ESR / DuckDuckGo / Thunderbird / LibreOffice / GIMP / eID Software

https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/cu ... so-hybrid/

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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#25 Post by donald »

Fossy wrote: 2023-02-01 10:35 Why not consider spinning up this forum into two separate forums , a Debian STABLE user forum and a pure Debian SID forum ?
Does not only satisfy both parties , but may well end up attracting more new " normal " c.q. Debian Stable users to this forum ?
There does not seem to be enough traffic to the SID only sub-forum at this time for something like that considering a few factors that work against that idea such as: The SID section is relatively new and does not really give a good idea of the metrics of the users, some of the SID users will abandon it for Stable and become Stable or Old-Stable users, There will be a lot of overlap, with the last thing I can think of was the SID forum was somewhat created to lump the SID/Testing things into its own separate area under the same umbrella as the rest of the forums which hold a lot of knowledge.
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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#26 Post by fabien »

Hallvor wrote: 2023-01-31 15:19The poll has been open since November, and it is still far from being statistically reliable.
Maybe not so much new Debian users in the forum? I opened a poll which might help to have an idea.

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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#27 Post by NFT5 »

Seriously, there is no need for a poll on this. We already know the answer, and have for a long time.

The amount of documentation for Debian is phenomenal but it's scattered all over the place and very little of it is user friendly, even if new users can actually find what they're looking for. Yes, I understand that searching for something with the right terms will yield results, but when you're new you may not know those search terms. And the Debian documentation doesn't couch things in terms of problems, examples and solutions.

So, you Google it with some kind of description of the problem. Not surprisingly someone else has already probably done the same and you get results from Ubuntu and Mint forums. Up until quite recently if you did happen to land here you'd likely get a RTFM response and move on. A good possibility that you'd also get hits from various blogs, many of which are years out of date or give poor advice. But, as a newbie, you don't know which advice is good and which is bad. Chances are you choose the wrong one.

I kept bookmarks of all the places that I found answers to various questions from the day I switched to Debian. There would be well over hundred links in that list and while the number from this forum is probably the highest, most of those were added later, once I had some basic knowledge. Otherwise, lots of links to Ubuntu and Mint forums, the Arch Wiki, other social media sites and a few technical pages, especially for specific software or more general tasks like setting up a network. Do the man pages get a mention? Not a single one. Lots of detail there but totally overwhelming for a new user.

So, to go back to the original question:
to develop our Help, HowTo and Documentation content
the answers are quite simple.
  • Change the way that new members are treated here. Already implemented and kudos to @donald and the other admins and moderators who have effected this
  • Undertake a massive project to take all the existing Debian resources and combine them into a single resource, like the Arch Wiki, but specifically Debian and better. I have trouble imagining that even Debian could mobilise the resources necessary to achieve this, but I've been wrong before.
  • Here on this forum? Maybe start with some kind of index that points to the most common issues and provides solutions. Not links to man pages or similar but step by step instructions explaining what each step achieves. It's going to be a big job, but now we have all these new Section Mods.....
  • For Debian, more broadly? Start with the Debian website and organise it so that links are easy to find and information is presented in a clear and logical sequence.
  • Again, for Debian. Tackle the change of userbase by understanding that there are, essentially two kinds of users - the traditional command line server admin and the user who rarely drops to the command line and wants to use Debian in GUI.
  • Encourage devs to come up with GUI applications that a) work; and, b) address a need that hasn't already been done a hundred times with 20 forks because someone didn't like the colours used in the original app. Take a lesson from MX Linux. Maybe start with something like Users and Groups, the app for which has been broken for so long that it doesn't even get a look in in most desktops today.
This is just a start and other members can add to the list,but I think it starts to address the point posed in the original post.

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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#28 Post by denkin »

I start with a Google search.
In the search results, I prefer the Debian wiki.
I often find the answer in blogs.
(English is not my native language)

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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#29 Post by donald »

@NFT5 Great Post!
NFT5 wrote: 2023-02-05 12:18 The amount of documentation for Debian is phenomenal but it's scattered all over the place
Agreed....
NFT5 wrote: 2023-02-05 12:18 So, to go back to the original question:
to develop our Help, HowTo and Documentation content
the answers are quite simple.
  • Change the way that new members are treated here. Already implemented and kudos to @donald and the other admins and moderators who have effected this
  • Undertake a massive project to take all the existing Debian resources and combine them into a single resource, like the Arch Wiki, but specifically Debian and better. I have trouble imagining that even Debian could mobilise the resources necessary to achieve this, but I've been wrong before.
  • Here on this forum? Maybe start with some kind of index that points to the most common issues and provides solutions. Not links to man pages or similar but step by step instructions explaining what each step achieves. It's going to be a big job, but now we have all these new Section Mods.....
Thank you for the compliment and noticing the changes for user interaction. :)

I would love to see Debian having an overall staging ground for information, documentations, and so on. Arch Wiki really set the standard for it. Ours seems to be fragmented and all of the place and some of it can be very hard to read or understand without well documented examples or proof of use.

One of the many things that we are hoping to do here is to rectify which parts of that confusion we can by updating old threads, encouraging members to write HowTos and Documentation from the User perspective, using the thread prefix titles which are great when people search for something and can find the word "Solved" in the thread title.

Perhaps at some point we can figure out how to either push information from the forums up to the wiki, or really start to highlight our Documentation, Installation, and other user driven sub-forums as the best user based resource for user written experience/laymans documentation.
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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#30 Post by arzgi »

donald wrote: 2023-02-06 04:49

I would love to see Debian having an overall staging ground for information, documentations, and so on. Arch Wiki really set the standard for it. Ours seems to be fragmented and all of the place and some of it can be very hard to read or understand without well documented examples or proof of use.
I too have used Arch Wiki, if Debian Wiki does not cover some subject. Debian policy is that every package should have a man page, even if that would not be the first thing new users think. There are good, bad, and overhelming long ones.

Use examples are many times showed in /usr/share/doc/[package name], which I have found good to check. More scatter :mrgreen:

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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#31 Post by oswaldkelso »

It's old and unloved well out of date so now rightly locked. But still a good resource for those that care to use as a base for updating?

viewtopic.php?p=270178

Thinking about it I'm sure the was a later version somewhere. Anyway just a thought. :?:
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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#32 Post by donald »

oswaldkelso wrote: 2023-02-06 19:31 It's old and unloved well out of date so now rightly locked. But still a good resource for those that care to use as a base for updating?

viewtopic.php?p=270178

Thinking about it I'm sure the was a later version somewhere. Anyway just a thought. :?:
Nice thread! Go for it. @FreewheelinFrank can we fit it in this sub-forum or elsewhere you think?
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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#33 Post by sunrat »

oswaldkelso wrote: 2023-02-06 19:31 It's old and unloved well out of date so now rightly locked. But still a good resource for those that care to use as a base for updating?

viewtopic.php?p=270178

Thinking about it I'm sure the was a later version somewhere. Anyway just a thought. :?:
Freshly updated version of Beginners Guide is here - viewtopic.php?t=58557
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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#34 Post by donald »

That updated thread should be an entirely newly created thread, perhaps merging with oswaldkelso's update. For example that thread post date is: 2010-12-20 15:38, internal updates to it likely are not being indexed by search engines which recently have been crawling us at an extremely rapid pace. Better to have new threads rather the old ones as part of the updating and keeping things current project.
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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#35 Post by FreewheelinFrank »

donald wrote: 2023-02-06 23:15
oswaldkelso wrote: 2023-02-06 19:31 It's old and unloved well out of date so now rightly locked. But still a good resource for those that care to use as a base for updating?

viewtopic.php?p=270178

Thinking about it I'm sure the was a later version somewhere. Anyway just a thought. :?:
Nice thread! Go for it. @FreewheelinFrank can we fit it in this sub-forum or elsewhere you think?
We already have this beginners' guide.

viewtopic.php?t=58557

Maybe the authors would like to collaborate on an edited version, choose one and add any useful information from the other, or differentiate them somehow to cover different topics?

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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#36 Post by oswaldkelso »

Yes I recall now. The 2 were the same. I just searched for "beginners guide oswaldkelso" hence got the first link. There was me Nadir and Hazel. I'm not sure if they had access to edit it as user "beginners-guide" but I did. I long ago forgot the password and we all went our separate ways after the systemd debacle. Hazel to Slackware me to Dragora and Nadir to the skatepark. :lol:

Anyway good to see it's alive n kicking. It just needs a bit more love. Sorry for all the noise.
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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#37 Post by sunrat »

Sent a PM to @FreewheelinFrank and @oswaldkelso about revitalising the Beginners Guide. The current guide has up-to-date information following my recent revamp but I get the point new post dates would be optimal rather than having the 2010 dates which have all been edited and updated.
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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#38 Post by BBQdave »

It's been awhile, the last time I loaded and used Debian GNU/Linux. After stepping away from Fedora Linux, I tried a PixelBook, but the experience was not a full work station. So with a couple of laptops available, I have Debian and Fedora loaded and am most pleased :)

The Debian wiki is incredible. And I added flatpak for current versions of Darktable and GIMP. The flatpak documentation is good.
The Forum is great too. Reading thru and gaining knowledge :)

Very happy with the default documentation and this forum. Makes Debian very accessible :)
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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#39 Post by revmacian »

I've only been using Debian for a week and the only non-forum resources I've needed are found at https://www.debian.org/doc, specifically https://wiki.debian.org. It's only been a week but I'm already comfortable knowing those resources are there if I have a need.
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Re: NEW USERS ONLY: What non-forum resources have you used the most when learning Debian?

#40 Post by Crunchy »

Youtube!

Definetely Youtube...

Sometimes Reddit

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