Do technical writers think Ubuntu is for morons?
Jem Matzen thinks so. He does have a point — some of the books on Ubuntu out there (including The Official Ubuntu Book) seem to focus on doing simple things. As Matzen points out:
On the one hand, the over-simplistic how-to guides provide the impression that Ubuntu is easy to use, or at very least that appropriate documentation is available. On the other hand, the articles in question are published in places where only technical people are likely to see them, and therefore present a more negative impression — that Ubuntu is for noobs and morons. If you are a technically-minded Windows user who wants to switch to Linux, Ubuntu could very well seem like an option to avoid because of this stigma-by-association.
A lot of of the books and articles out there seem to be aimed at people jumping to Ubuntu from Windows (and maybe MacOS). And not power users, either — ordinary users who (so the writers believe) want to easily duplicate the experience they have with those other operating systems when using Ubuntu.
If you do a little digging, say visting one of the Planet Ubuntu sites, you can find some good, technical pieces. One of my favourite sources for information is Ubuntu Tutorials. It contains a mix of (fairly) easy things to do, along with more advanced advice (like this piece on compressing VNC connections over SSH).
I’m sure that there are more resources with advanced information about Ubuntu. And if there aren’t, then maybe it’s time to encourage the community to start collecting and distributing that information.
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