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

[Jürgen Werner]

Am 22.09.2016 um 02:58 schrieb Jason Ryan via arch-general:
> 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…
>
> /J
>

I just had a look at the Installation Guide and as a seasoned user I
must say it's pretty comprehensive and right to the point! *BUT *being a
seasoned user I can't take the perspective of a beginner any more. When
I came to Arch I had some experience with other distros (mostly the once
that obfuscate the insides of a Linux distro). The Beginners Guide
helped me to get on track to start learning how a Linux distro really
worked. It was the beginning of great experience and I'm thankful for
every Arch Linux boot on my machine since then.
I don't know, if starting with such a scarce Installation Guide would
have made my motor running like the Beginners Guide. I just can't say.
Time has past, as for almost every one on this mailing list.
My point is, that it's not wrong to engage new and even inexperienced
users in Arch Linux, because IMHO it is the distro you can learn most
from about Linux. Sure, beginners break their installations, lose their
data, etc. That's nothing bad. The more you lose the more you learn and
be more careful next time. And if they get disappointed or frustrated
about that and go back to Ubuntu or whatever, so be it. Then they are
really the wrong people for Arch.

That being said, I'm still in favour of the merge of Installation and
Beginners Guide, but maybe we could include some more background
information for beginners (not to much though ;)). And to not distract
the seasoned users, these infos could be placed in collapsed boxes with
some header like "Beginners information". There is a wiki template
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Collapse> for such boxes, but I
think it's not included in our wiki yet. It would be still nice and tidy
and maintainable, while being informative for beginners.

pogo