Linux video man pages

The first aim of this project is to provide four categories of tutorial videos for at least the ~100 most important Linux console commands and Linux concepts (not all topics require all four categories):

• a very short video (128 seconds) for beginners

• a regular-length video for beginners

• a regular-length video for advanced users

• maybe an additional video with many examples

If this is successful then the scope may be extended beyond basic console tools.

These videos shall

• cover all the problems mentioned below

• offer recommendations by experienced Linux users beyond the explanation of the core subject

• be combined into playlists (the short ones); one hour of video would be 27 subjects – too much to remember but a good start for learning to use the Linux console (or deciding if you want to learn that)

• be available in many languages (like man pages, Wikipedia, and the Linux distro web sites)

• allow the audience to easily reproduce on their own system what they saw in the video. This cannot be well achieved with normal videos alone at all. Thus the normal videos on the popular video platforms shall be supplemented by a website which contains (for each video):

  • the same video as text video which allows to copy&paste the commands from the video into a shell and also makes the video readable for people with visual impairments

  • commands (for copy&paste) and (alternatively) a tar archive that recreates the files and directory structure, and config files used in the video

  • additional text information if useful

  • the script of the video

If people are willing to participate in providing information about Linux then

• it should be easy for them to do so; the organisation managing the video collection should invite them to do so

• they should know in advance that a high-quality video will be published in a context with guarantees that it can easily be found by a large share of the audience

• it should be enough to be good at one of the steps involved:

  1. writing a script

  2. proofreading scripts

  3. translating scripts

  4. creating videos

  5. narrating

  6. maintaining the supporting website

  7. deploying the videos to different platforms

  8. checking existing videos regularly (e.g. yearly) to determine whether they need updates

  9. handling volunteers

• There is not a single source that covers almost everything

  • you need several sources

  • you do not know in advance what the videos from a particular source are like

  • the videos are not coordinated

  • there is no guarantee that the videos will be available and updated long-term

• Many videos contain mistakes. The quality is not reliable (it is to a large extent within the same channel, though).

• Most videos waste a lot of time given the amount of information they contain. They are not optimised for brevity. A short video is not always what the audience is looking for but often enough.

• Most channels have only one video about a subject so it is the wrong video for two of the three important target audiences:

  • beginners who want an introduction / summary only

  • beginners who want the full content for beginners

  • advanced users (long video)

• Many videos show the narrator. That may be nice in some cases but for the quick lookup of condensed information especially and for any kind of "official" information source that seems inappropriate. Videos which are the equivalent of a man page or a web page should focus on the content. Man pages, Wikipedia articles, and the tutorial web pages of the different Linux distributions do not put focus on the authors; their authors are largely invisible. With a large number of videos being maintained over many years it is close to impossible anyway that they can all be created by the same person. Showing different people would just be confusing. It also seems unfair or inappropriate if several people are involved in creating these videos. The narrator is not more important than those who wrote the script or proofread it, or those who created some visual effects for the video.

• The videos by different channels have different styles and structures.

• Most of these videos are not available on several video platforms. "Official" content for the general public should not draw people to a specific platform.