this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Linux
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Eh, to be honest, manpages aren't particularly good as either documentation or quick references (hence the popularity of tldr), and info is intended primarily for the sort of long-form, comprehensive documentation that would be awkward to fit in a manpage. Also, texinfo documents can easily be exported to HTML, so one format can be used for both online and offline docs. It's an admirable effort, if nothing else.
I wasn't a huge fan of manpages either until I got a kernel class at uni. The man pages for syscalls and library calls are super well made.
I'd have liked it a lot better if it had been intended and used as a place to put the more extensive documentation that isn't really appropriate for a man page, while leaving the man pages as they were. Instead, I learned about it back in the day by being frequently annoyed at missing man pages for basic tools, which had been replaced with suggestions to look at 'info' instead, which always seemed to be much less concise and have a worse UI.
Actually sadly remember python-docs provided as info document.