[arch-general] What happened to the Beginner's Guide?

aur basica aurbasica at gmail.com
Thu Sep 22 01:42:42 UTC 2016


On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 11:01 AM, Dave via arch-general <
arch-general at archlinux.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 8:58 PM, Jason Ryan via arch-general <
> arch-general at archlinux.org> wrote:
>
> > On 21/09/16 at 08:36pm, Dave via arch-general wrote:
> >
> >> see below
> >>
> >> On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 8:12 PM, Francis Gerund via arch-general <
> >> arch-general at archlinux.org> wrote:
> >>
> >> I believe this change will only serve to alienate potential new users,
> >>>
> >>
> >> I strongly agree.
> >>
> >
> > This will only alienate new users that are unwilling to read man pages
> and
> > the
> > community provided documentation, ie., people for whom Arch is the wrong
> > choice
> > anyway…
>
>
> As a new user of Arch, I think this attitude is incorrect as well as
> harmful to Arch.
>

Arch is geared towards (and I quote) "the competent Linux® user" and the
installation guide offers everything someone familiar with their system
needs. The main benefit of the beginner's guide was that it offered all the
information in one location, but this information hasn't disappeared as
it's available on other pages, linked to when necessary. This once again
shouldn't pose an issue to the more advanced users. The beginner's guide
did a lot more hand-holding which if we're catering to more advanced users
is not only adding unnecessary information it's potentially attracting
users who are not going to be able to properly run and maintain the system
after the install.

As a personal example, I recently installed Arch on one of my PCs and I
found the beginner's guide to be way too verbose. I got lost trying to find
what else I was meant to do and was hit with a whole bunch of unneeded
information. The install guide is nice and concise and I was able to
quickly skim through it and get the information I need. It saves me the
need to write my own notes, which I'd be tempted to do if we had only the
beginner's guide.


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