A common criticism of free software is that it comes with no support. That is not entirely true, since most projects maintain man pages and, in the case of the GNU Project, info pages. However, man and info pages are mostly for developers. To compensate for the lack of more general documentation, many projects, including distributions, have resorted to a wide variety of media for support, including blogs, online manuals, FAQs, how-tos, forums, and IRC channels.
These methods of documentation can be an important factor in selecting a distribution, especially for beginners. Although all sorts of documentation are available online, a distro’s docs are a handy place to start. This allows users to avoid sorting through the glut of information on the Internet, much of which may be obsolete. Sometimes,…
