Somehow it just got me: Linux HowTos haven't been created or maybe even updated since ca. 2007.<p><a href="https://www.linuxhowtos.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.linuxhowtos.org/</a><p>I haven't been using them for last 20 years... I still remember how useful they were in my early Linux days in 1999-2002. I will never forget the one about making coffee (<a href="http://fotis.home.cern.ch/fotis/Coffee.html" rel="nofollow">http://fotis.home.cern.ch/fotis/Coffee.html</a>). I made the relay circuit built into a power supply and that was so much fun!<p>But now they are all forgotten. Dead even. Why?
The linked site isn't where most HOWTOs were kept; they resided at <a href="https://tldp.org/" rel="nofollow">https://tldp.org/</a><p>Are they dead? Not <i>completely</i> dead, but there is only one or two people still maintaining the site + HOWTOs (they organize on GitHub and a mailing list currently). But there's simply nobody volunteering to maintain them or write new articles.<p>Why is that? Because popular things get action and unpopular things don't. HOWTOs aren't popular.<p>Why is that? Because blogs and the invention of "Q&A sites" made them unnecessary. Before you would use a HOWTO to teach yourself everything about a specific piece of software or technical thing. Now you don't really need to learn an entire thing. You can just google the one question you have, get the answer, and move on. You still don't know how 98% of that thing works, but you fixed your problem. Since this solves most people's problems, they don't see value in taking the time to write an entire HOWTO, which may take weeks to months for a really good HOWTO. Similarly, users don't look for them because nobody's writing them. There is no incentive anymore.<p>SEO is part of the reason that traffic began being moved towards blogs and Q&A sites. But SEO alone didn't bring about the cultural shift towards snippets of answers. It was simply a new generation that learned tech outside of the old OSS community, and developed their own ways of learning. Just like the old OSS community created their own way of learning different than their previous generation.
Not an answer to why it is dead, but the Archlinux wiki, which offers decent replacement for the functional part of the traditional HOWTOs, have been around since 2005 and have established itself as a decent info source for Linux users at large, not just the arch initiates.
The state of Linux docs as seen through Google is appalling. Searing for things like "how to set up rsnapshot backups" are full of garbage articles that are 800 words like whose only actual content is "apt install rsnapshot". Maybe this is a Google problem.<p>It doesn't help the Ubuntu docs have fallen into total disrepair. Most searches for information there find 6 year old stuff that's no longer relevant. Major sections of manuals have apparently been abandoned.<p>The bright spot is Arch Linux; that wiki is amazing. I now am adding Arch to most of my search queries even though I have no intention of ever using Arch.
Bad SEO I suppose. When I search for something, I often get a page by some "expert" in which the information is wrong, commands don't work and so on. I wish I could figure out how to eliminate them from my search results. The worst part is that it is usually impossible to contact the author and point out the errors. Like they would care.
I used to write articles like this for my blog. There's a reason they really don't exist anymore:<p>First is that documentation has gotten much better. A lot of times a repository will have examples alongside it. Man pages, help menus, and entire statically generated documentation sites have all advanced this quite a bit - and much of what they do share space with what I used to write about. It's worth mentioning that a lot of times, I was writing to a very <i>specific</i> end goal. Documentation sites will usually what you through what I did and then some.<p>Second is that Linux userlands have diverged a lot. There's not a ton of standardization around userspace tooling, so it makes writing an article (that needs to be updated) an up-hill battle.<p>Third, Linode and DigitalOcean use these kinds of articles as PR. They're high quality, often versioned, and help users understand broader contexts as well.<p>So, are they dead? Yes, in a sense. They inspired a lot though, so in that way I think they still live on.
Personally I believe Linux has matured to a pretty decent usability level for the average user. Ubuntu, Opensuse, Linux Mint and some of the like have taken a lot of the hard work out of managing and installing a linux OS. It used to be that you would slave hours of getting your specific hardware to work with a particular flavor of Linux. Now you have drivers that are plentiful and up to date, bugs that get fixed fast, and large communities at near enterprise levels maintaining the updates. Frankly a pretty good time to be a Linux user.
Linux community documentation falls into a few categories:<p>1. Copypasta that appears on many different websites. Usually the first hits in Google. Usually terrible.<p>2. Curated, quality material on sites like Linode or Digital Ocean.<p>3. Blogs from people who actually work with the stuff and have ran into interesting problems/solutions. Can vary but usually pretty good.<p>4. Distro docs like Arch wiki
Wow. This post reminded me that I wrote a HOWTO 20+ years ago:<p><a href="https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Emacs-Beginner-HOWTO.html" rel="nofollow">https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Emacs-Beginner-HOWTO.html</a><p>It's still sorta relevant, I guess...<p>What a blast from the past.
Imho, the reason for it is that now we have much more sources of information.
How tos were a concentrated pieces of information distributed with Linux distributions or via slow mediums…
20+ years ago I was involved 8th Russian translation of many how to’s and they were used because there were no other sources of information, but now you can just translate almost any page to language that you need
What I miss more is the “rtfm.mit.edu” FTP site, which was a repository for all the FAQ’s of all the Usenet newsgroups. I don’t even know if it was mirrored anywhere.<p>(I know about faqs.org, but those are frequently wildly out of date compared with those on rtfm.mit.edu, which seemed to be continously updated.)
Except for a few programs like ss or nftables nothing has changed.
you can still use shred, despite the usage of journaled filesystems, cp works like 20 years ago and nothing has changed with ln and i make still errors with the target and the source.
so the old howtos are still valid.
I think the simple answer is that distributions got a whole bunch of polish and automation.<p>I install Ubuntu these days by building a boot drive using a gui tool, then just clicking my way through the installers. Getting online involves ... typing in my password. In the late 90s I had to figure out AT commands and set up ppp and so on, and getting X11 up and running required config voodoo.<p>I miss some of it. Not that much though.
Digital Ocean's guides are IMHO the spiritual successor: <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials" rel="nofollow">https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials</a>
While formal HOWTOs might not get much attention, it's pretty clear Linux tutorials of all types are both being made and consumed in a variety of media. People often bring up how much value they get out of the articles DigitalOcean puts together, for instance. Those aren't HOWTOs necessarily, but does it matter?<p>There's also the fact that people just consume that kind of content differently nowadays. While it's hard for me to understand, people younger than myself seem to get a lot out of guided video tutorials over text.
The particular site referenced by the OP is not the only source. I spend a fair amount of time writing howtos, mostly about Linux.
<a href="https://mslinn.com/blog/blogsByDate.html" rel="nofollow">https://mslinn.com/blog/blogsByDate.html</a><p>I'm not dead yet, and neither are howtos!
Practically nobody writes classic HOWTOs anymore.<p>At best you get amateurs speaking authoritatively on subjects they've barely scratched the surface of in blog posts they can try monetize, at worst you get the same thing but in the form of a youtube video.
This to the very extent, is still very valuable for me to a personal level. However I can understand why people would divert away from it, people have grown apathy for comprehensive and deep heap of information and want "quick" low quality "fixes" for their problems. Part of the reason why "googling" is so popular and the index of information is represented in terms of SEO while still questionable on the quality of information and reliability yielded by SEs like google.
Personally, I get almost all my Linux "how-tos" from either Stackoverflow or, for more basic questions, ubuntuusers.de.<p>The latter one is a German wiki that has a similar premise to linuxhowtos.org, but it seems to be much more active and most entries I was looking at were up-to-date. Kinda weird because I consume tech articles and man pages almost exclusively in English – with the big exception of ubuntuusers.de because there doesn't seem to be a good counterpart within the first few Google/kagi results.
I think at this point the Arch Wiki has supplanted all other sources as the definitive source of Linux howtos, given the size of the community and its values.
With the rise of quality how-tos from places like Digital Ocean, vendors/suppliers/package maintainers, good blogs (not all blogs are "good", not all "good" how-tos are on "good" blogs, I know), places like LHT didn't have as much of a reason to continue<p>I had forgotten about it until seeing your question this morning :)
The site is dead because of lack of maintenance and everyone hosting their own how-to content on their github, podcast, youtube, website and Q&A site. If this was re-imagined, it might be an aggregator that served as a directory to all the howto content...
Plenty of them here, and regular additions being made.<p><a href="https://www.howtoforge.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.howtoforge.com/</a>
Mostly because Linux is 'good enough' for most use cases out of the box nowadays. Between Ubuntu, Debian and a bunch of other distros there is one out there for everybody with most of the stuff that you'd need a howto for in the past working out of the box. This is a positive development imo.