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The Linux Documentation Project Guides

tldp.org

97 pointsghosthamlet16 comments

Not sure what there is to talk about here: TLDP has been essentially dead for many years, unfortunately (exactly one document was updated in 2015; one was updated in 2014; ..). It was a fantastic resource back in the day (I wrote one of many HOWTOs), but lost any relevance at least a decade ago.

Yeah. It really needed sponsorship of some sort back in the early 2000s to help keep it organized and managed. It got none and as the original organizers moved on it left pretty much no one and even though some of the documentation was maintained, the project as a whole slowly faded.

The Linux Documentation Project, not to be confused with The Linux Kernel Documentation (https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/).

Now days the guides put out by the likes of Linode and Digital Ocean seem to be more current and easy to follow. The other thing is that with so many flavors of Linux having one reference doesn't make much sense since each is a little different and always changing.

The Arch wiki has been extremely helpful to me aswell.

Arch wiki is extremely helpful if you know what you're looking for (for example I want to setup Secure Boot, it's easy to follow) but unfortunately there is no "best practices"/high level guides there (it takes a lot of time to think of the modern/"best" setup you want to have). It reminds me of Wikipedia's NPOV.

Some pages even cover the differences among other distros. It's full of rich information I don't get even from the originating projects own websites / docs (if there's any).

The Arch wiki is probably the closest thing that's actually maintained. I'm personally not a big fan of Arch, but it's worth installing it and messing around with a bit so that you're able to distinguish the arch-specific instructions in their wiki from things that apply generically to the same daemons when configured on other linux platforms.

Just out of curiosity could you elaborate on the "not a fan of Arch" statement? Is this the rolling release model or just something else?

Not that person, but what put me off arch is that they aim to provide "vanilla" packages, which means I have to configure everything on my own.

It's fine for learning, but a hassle otherwise. Their wiki is becoming less useful too with their idea of providing less step by step and they want you to read everything and figure it out. Again fine for learning but sometimes you don't want to spend the time.

But I'm a user, not a sysadmin so maybe it's not aimed at me.

Thanks for your input! Which distro did you end up using?

I am also an ArchLinux refugee and I agree with the previous post about docs and just the general difficulty of using the distribution. It was fine when I was younger and had more time to kill configuring my tools but now I just want "works out of the box" mostly.

I use Fedora with XFCE.

Debian Testing, but pull in firefox from unstable

> Not that person, but what put me off arch is that they aim to provide "vanilla" packages, which means I have to configure everything on my own.

I highly suggest Antergos [0]. It's a pre-configured, easy to install Arch Linux. I switched to Antergos from Ubuntu mainly for the 'rolling releases', the good Arch documentation and the package registry (AUR, etc.). It's the best Linux experience that I ever had. I love the rolling releases.

0: https://antergos.com/

These HOWTOs are how I taught myself to become a sysadmin when I was 16. It would be great to bring something like it back. (I have been lazily working on something, but nothing solid yet)

I've used the TLDP network guide as recently as last year.. If you make a replacement for TLDP, I hope you will focus on collaborative processes and guidelines. I think that is what made the TLDP guides useful for decades.

There's no shortage of more recent material that is less useful than combining TLDP with manpages of new commands..

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