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For those not paying close attention, TLDP hasn't been updated in about 6 years, but much of it hasn't been updated in 15-20 years. Just keep using the Internet (ServerFault/Digital Ocean/ArchWiki/Ubuntu Wiki/etc) and man pages.
This brings back some great memories. I learned so much from the HOWTOs, and I think they played a big part in getting me my first proper tech job. I just had to sit and figure it out, and the process of persevering through the mistakes and dead ends ultimately gave me a level of confidence around computers and technology in general which has been incredibly useful in work and in life.
I second that—memories installing gentoo on iBook G4 and getting the wireless to work felt like a nice accomplishment :) Granted, the gentoo docs are really good so that’s where I went mostly.
Last updated in 2015: https://tldp.org/sorted_howtos.html
There have been some updates in the Github repo since then ( https://github.com/tLDP/LDP/commits/master ) but I don't notice any new content. It was a great resource for me decades ago, but now I understand TLDP to be mostly old and stale (and sometimes arguably bad, such as the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide) and generally better sources can be easily found.
This brings back some great memories. I learned so much from the HOWTOs, and I think they played a big part in getting me my first proper tech job. I just had to sit and figure it out, and the process of persevering through the mistakes and dead ends ultimately gave me a level of confidence around computers and technology in general which has been incredibly useful in work and in life.
For those not paying close attention, TLDP hasn't been updated in about 6 years, but much of it hasn't been updated in 15-20 years. Just keep using the Internet (ServerFault/Digital Ocean/ArchWiki/Ubuntu Wiki/etc) and man pages.
But man pages are man pages, not HOWTOs and thus don’t tell you ... how to :)
I gained the skills to become a Systems Admin when I was 17 by reading and following HOWTOs. I keep telling myself I will start writing new HOWTOs and publish them there, because the blog-spam instructions of today make it take 10x longer to get things done. Would anybody else write new HOWTOs?
Same here. With those HOWTOs I was able to learn networking from scratch in home without actually having internet connection. Good times :) > Would anybody else write new HOWTOs? I always wanted to, but because I'm not native English speaker I was always afraid to publish anything. Still i think it could be very beneficial - especially that we all observed dozen of forums and websites just vanished over the last deca…
I gained the skills to become a Systems Admin when I was 17 by reading and following HOWTOs. I keep telling myself I will start writing new HOWTOs and publish them there, because the blog-spam instructions of today make it take 10x longer to get things done. Would anybody else write new HOWTOs?
I usually look at at least two sources for cross referencing and can find how to do just about anything, though I trust some sources to get it right most of the time. Digital Ocean has done a good job of developing a strong set of how-To’s for nuts and bolts things you might want to do on a VPS (aka droplet).
Beyond that, I just do web searches and if a couple respectable looking sites agree on something, I tend to trust it. It’d be cool if there really were sort of a clearing house of curated list of the top Linux how to sites out there with sites that get abandoned sort of identified as such kind of like a repo that’s not being updated. Abadoneware is an issue but abandoned how to websites are super common. It’s hard to keep writing and keeping a site current year after year so it’s not surprising.
As someone who’s written documentation, I know how hard it is to write a good how to. To really write a good how to you have to really understand what you’re writing about and actually run through it to make sure your instructions work and are clear to the reader. Hat’s off to anyone who writes real docs not just cobbling together content for SEO and letting it stagnate.
Anyway, are there any curated clearinghouses with links to the best maintained sets of howtos on different things such as commands, scripting, sys admin, and just articles on how to be more efficient on Linux?
My favorite resource: https://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php "The Linux Command Line", also available in dead-tree version from No Starch Press. The PDF of the Fifth Edition is available for free from the link above.
The thing I miss the most about man pages is the total lack of runnable examples
I get what I have to do 10 times faster from an example (preferably one in which I can just substitute the target files) than if I have to actually understand the manual lingo