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This question popped up today. Now, it's a terrible question (very unclear), but I think what she's asking is just a basic "I'm new to Ubuntu... how does I use this thing?" Many Ubuntu users are tech savvy, but we forget how confusing and overwhelming a new OS is to your average joe user, and I think we could go a long way toward helping with the transition.

Maybe my search-fu is off, but I couldn't find any good questions that deal with this in an easy-to-navigate format. We have bits and pieces as questions have been asked, I think it might be worth putting together a CW, heavily cross-linked "Intro to Ubuntu" FAQ (akin to the SO FAQ series of questions, only not on meta). Has anything like this been started yet? If not, I'm happy to kick it off.

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    It's an interesting idea - but the Ubuntu Documentation should be taking care of this, IMO. I'll see what comes of this discussion though Apr 26, 2011 at 21:14

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There's a great blog post by Jorge I think similar to your idea, The power user's guide to unity.

I think it's a good idea, but to survive the community's scruteny it has to be full of great answers. I suggest if you decide to ask that question, you might want to start off the answer as well. Provide about 20 questions (and ask new ones if necessary), and link them up.

Beginner questions usually get a lot of views and upvotes, so I don't see any problem in asking them if they're not already asked (sticking to the guidelines obviously).

As Marco points out, the docs are supposed to solve this problem. So, it might be a good idea to link to the official documentation as much as you can, rather than questions on AU.

If it still gets closed, that's life - nobody'll say you didn't think about it carefully. :-)

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  • That is a great compilation of links. Apr 29, 2011 at 18:22
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I started an Index page.

I modeled it loosely after the Stack Exchange FAQ, but as Marco points out in the comments, it isn't Jeopardy-style. Is there a reason the SO FAQ isn't structured like that?

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  • I don't think creating things like "What is a terminal?" will work, can you join us in chat and we can sort something better perhaps? Apr 29, 2011 at 20:01
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I agree, even if there's Ubuntu Documentation and others trying to tackle this problem, Ask Ubuntu should also have a basic thread which will point to more relevant places along with a short intro.

Like the quoted question's questioner, many new users may come here seeking the ropes, so instead of just ignoring them saying the issue is being tackled by so-and-so, we need to point the users to so-and-so.

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Every new user has different questions. Many have different hardware, so they have different problems. So they have different needs. The whole AU-site is to 50% about beginners problems. Collecting them in a superquestion isn't a good idea - it isn't meaningfully taggable and will not improve the search exprerience. I vote to close the question.

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