Direction of the Ubuntu system docs

[Phil Bull]

Hi Jonathan,

On Wed, 2010-12-22 at 21:34 -0500, Jonathan Jesse wrote:
> As to the different books I was referencing the Official Ubuntu book,
> the book you link to and other books Ubuntu ooks there are.

I think it's good to have decent, freely-available, built-in
documentation, even if books might do a better job in some
circumstances. User assistance is an important facet of usability, so we
should do our best to provide help out of the box.

> So if we stick to topic based help wouldn't it just make sense to
> cover things like customizing the desktop, etc reference Unity instead
> of Gnome?   Note I'm not a Gnome dude and it has been a while since
> I've looked at the Ubuntu documentation.  Would it be that hard to
> reference Unity instead of Gnome?

The problem is that Ubuntu mostly consists of GNOME applications (e.g.
preference tools, file browser), which have GNOME documentation. In
order to be more useful to users (i.e. to not be confusingly general),
this documentation makes the assumption that a relatively GNOME-y user
interface is available. This means that we may have to make minor
patches to quite a lot of it to make it make sense for Unity.
Fortunately, the GNOME help will soon be Mallard-based, so patching and
replacing topics should be relatively easy.

Another issue is that Ubuntu falls back to a GNOME 2.x interface if the
computer doesn't have graphics support sufficient to run Unity. We would
have to provide something like the current Ubuntu docs + GNOME 2.x docs
in that case. (And, presumably, a topic to explain why the hell the
user's desktop looks nothing like any of the nice screenshots they saw
before they installed Ubuntu!)

Thanks,

Phil

-- 
Phil Bull
https://launchpad.net/~philbull
Book - http://nostarch.com/ubuntu4.htm