Ubuntu Help compared with other help systems

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

On Apr 2, 2006, at 9:33 PM, Dean Sas wrote:
> ...
> I just don't think manpages are useful for 90%+ of the population. To
> use a manpage means you're going to have to drop to a terminal anyway,
> so there's not that much point for it to show up in searches for 
> techies (perhaps unless they specifically ask for it). I can't think 
> what usable information man pages provide that'd be useful to a non 
> techie, if we ever have to rely on man pages to fix untechnical 
> peoples problems we've failed already.
> ...

Perhaps, but your user base is not "untechnical people". The kind of 
people who open help in the first place are predominantly experts, not 
novices. <http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/11/29/497861.aspx>

(This is probably even more true in Ubuntu, since the help is in a menu 
labelled "System".)

-- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/