The linked site isn't where most HOWTOs were kept; they resided at https://tldp.org/
Are they dead? Not completely 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.
Why is that? Because popular things get action and unpopular things don't. HOWTOs aren't popular.
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.
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.
It's worth noting that this is pretty much a Linux Thing, due to the extreme levels of software churn that platform experiences.
BSDs are a great example of how this idea isn't actually dead - the FreeBSD Handbook is essentially the greatest HOWTO ever written. But it can only exist because there isn't the Linux levels of software churn. It is frankly absurd bordering on obscene how quickly Linux documentation "rots", this is not normal and it's not the way it has to be. Very very few other platforms experience this to within even an order of magnitude of the rot rate that Linux does.
This is even true of, say, Windows. Most Windows 10 guides from 2018? Still pretty much work even 4 years later. Can you honestly say that Ubuntu 18.04 guides (even LTS, not even rolling release) actually would even be worth a moment's consideration?
This degree of doc rot is not normal. A little less focus on "move quickly and break things", a little less re-implementing the wheel for the Nth time, and a little more focus on proper systems design from the outset really really needs to be a focus, because the doc rot has gotten absurd over the last 8-10 years.
X is being deprecated in favor of Wayland, the only way to not use it is to not use new versions of Linux.
NetworkManager replaced every other networking that came before it, DBus replaced configuration files/CLI tools/UNIX sockets, PolicyKit->polkit replaced standard Unix permissions (and before that PAM, which oddly still exists), filesystem standard changed (/sys/ and /run/ didn't used to be a thing), bluetooth changed, alsa -> pulseaudio -> pipewire. Most hardware and driver specific behavior seems to change, breaking whatever system files, configuration, modules, firmware, etc came before. Video subsystems seem to change like every 5 years.
And systemd isn't just "12 years old", it has been growing (like The Blob) for 12 years. It used to just be an init system. Now it's a network manager, a DNS resolver, a log manager, a credential manager, a login manager, a partition manager (yes, really), a container manager. resolv.conf -> systemd-resolv, fdisk -> systemd partition, syslog -> journald, netrc -> systemd credentials, login/controlkit -> logind, docker -> systemd.
Among the most serious changes is that now you literally have to use systemd for most graphical environments on Linux. To not use systemd, you have to use fake systemd replacement tools, because everything depends on systemd so much now. That's some serious churn.
> Before you would use a HOWTO to teach yourself everything about a specific piece of software or technical thing.'
The whole point of HOWTO's as a documentation format is that they don't try to do this; rather, they address specific user needs. They're somewhat like the "next step" beyond simple Q&A and FAQ collections, and this is where much of their value could still be found.
>SEO is part of the reason that traffic began being moved towards blogs and Q&A sites.
Exactly mirroring the decline in the quality of google results.
You want something specific with say 4 words in the query string, convincing google not to drop one of those in basically every result it returns giving you nothing but SEO spam is a lot more difficult than it should be. Tried googling for something you read last week following a link and now can't find again despite it being about something really esoteric?
So yeah you can work around some of the goog breakage with :allintext or putting a + in front of ever term or putting every term in "quotes" but yeah, at the stage where you're the audience for howtos are you doing that? Dunno.
Who is old enough to remember when google was /liked/? Seems like a long time ago now, huh?
I don’t recall it that way. Everyone in tech was impressed by Google circa 1998 - it was the first search engine that really didn’t suck in some way. Facebook never had that level of tech cred, although it wasn’t as reviled early on as it is now.
I mean, AFAIK basically the first thing Sheryl did when she joined Facebook (from Google) in 2008 was break ranks with the wage-fixing cartel and immediately hire like a whole infrastructure organization from Google. Many if not most of the early-ish-days hardass hackers at FB were (figuratively) still wearing Google T-shirts when they built FB's scale infrastructure.
So to anyone paying attention at that time, it was pretty clear that the level of tech cred should be about the same. It was the same people.
I remember the love for Google products, scoring an invite to gmail. I don’t remember a distinct love for facebook. It was much cleaner than MySpace, and kind of exclusive because I needed my university email, but not love.
Yeah I don't think FB was ever very popular with the techie crowd: it didn't solve a problem they had as those people could like self-host their own blogs and photos and shit (and frankly took some enjoyment in the fact that the plebs couldn't). Techies had IRC and mailing lists and soon HN, etc.
Contrast that to Google which was an indispensable tool for any hacker on basically day one, people will forgive a lot from a company that they can't live without.
But many if not most non-techie people ranted and raved about how much they loved Facebook well into the 2010s, even if they started calling it Instagram at some point. The general public (especially lefty coastal public) didn't start taking out all their frustrations with Big Tech in general on Facebook in particular until 2016.
The story that Facebook got Trump elected is absurd (I worked in the abusive behavior / content moderation group then: I was in the room and the press got this one badly wrong), but it was a riveting story and most people seem to still believe it now. Even some Facebook employees in other orgs seemed to believe that FB had failed in not putting its finger on the scales.
As for why anyone would want CEOs of private-sector companies in San Francisco to unilaterally decide who the president is? That is a horrifying thought. I think Big Tech CEOs probably find that a horrifying thought. The fact that they probably could is nightmare fuel enough, and the fact that to my knowledge they don't probably means there is still some Anakin behind the Vader mask.
Sorry for the novel, but this is all going to go into the history books wrong, and it bothers me to be hung for the wrong crime. FB/Google/etc. have blown it many, many times by "moving fast and breaking things" on privacy, letting mid-level product managers do user-hostile shit with inadequate oversight, "warehouse first and ask questions later"-type stuff, any number of things. But it's an emergent property of rapid-cadence metrics-driven product management, not a Bond-villain stoking a mustache.
I'm old enough to still love Google. I think it is the wonder of our age.
Hell, I'm old enough to remember when altavista.digitial.com was the most amazing thing I'd seen. But the worse Google results today are as good as the average results from that or any other pre-Google search engine.
It was one guy maintaining it. I spoke with him a few years ago about it. I really wish people who do volunteer work would post their wallet address. Even if no one gives at the time when people miss your work it can be a good way of letting them know how much.
The only thing worse than video tutorials are what they do to your YouTube recommendations.
I absolutely hate both with a passion, but having mentored a fair number of junior developers I respect that some people benefit from them.
It's the same thing with podcasts and audiobooks- I'm the type of person who is fully tuned in, or I am tuned out. Listening to either while driving is completely pointless for me.
To be honest the the HOWTO system was clearly starting to die even by the early 2000s, before blogs and "answer sites" (as distinct from web forums more generally) really took off as sources of Linux advice.
Are they dead? Not completely 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.
Why is that? Because popular things get action and unpopular things don't. HOWTOs aren't popular.
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.
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.