Are "not only Ubuntu-specific" questions on-topic?

Question

I know this question has been asked and answered already here:

How do we tell if a question belongs here, or rather at stackoverflow/superuser?

However this topic came up recently again in a discussion in the comments of a question about sudo, where an user claimed the question be off-topic because of its "not only Ubuntu-specific"ness being sudo also installed in other distributions.

What really suprised me is that coming back on that question I saw those comments were upvoted.

I personally flagged a question once because I thought it could have been a better fit for Unix & Linux, but I was still wrong, because despite the question being general and "not only Ubuntu-specific" that didn't make it off-topic here by any mean, and so I shouldn't have flagged it. My bad. However I never thought the question was off-topic here, just that it could have been a better fit for Unix & Linux.

How can a question about sudo, essential for the administration of an Ubuntu system be off-topic on Ask Ubuntu because of its "not only Ubuntu-specific"ness?

I'm wondering if the consensus has changed over the last five years (the time at which the question above was posted).

Nonetheless if it did:

• Should we set questions about the kernel as off-topic because the kernel is present in all the Linux distributions and hence it's "not only Ubuntu-specific"?

• Should we set questions about systemd as off-topic because systemd is present in other Linux distributions and hence it's "not only Ubuntu-specific"?

• Should we set questions about the GNU tools as off-topic because the GNU tools are present in the vast majority of the Linux distributions and hence they're "not only Ubuntu-specific"?

And honestly I'm a little biased on the last questions, but to me it would be unthinkable to set off-topic things like sudo, the kernel, systemd or the GNU tools.

Answer 1

Of course they are! How could it be otherwise? If we were to only allow questions about things that exist in Ubuntu exclusively, we would have an empty site. There is very simply nothing that is 100% specific to Ubuntu. The Unity desktop environment can be installed on any system. Even the Ubuntu-modified kernel can be installed on another distribution.

It is the nature of Linux that all distributions are basically compatible. They are just a specific collection of packages and a kernel. Any software from one can be installed on another. At worst, you will have to compile from source if there is no package for the target distribution.

This site is about Ubuntu, yes. That means that the OP needs to be running Ubuntu in order to ask here and that the question needs to be about something running on Ubuntu. That doesn't exclude anything that also runs on other Linux flavors since, as I said above, anything that runs on Ubuntu can also run on other Linux flavors.

Answer 2

I am not surprised the comments were upvoted, because they were only upvoted once and to my knowledge there is no way a comment can ever be downvoted. I would have downvoted them when I saw them, and I'm sure many others would have as well. Only 1 person out of the 1363 viewers (at this writing) saw those comments and thought they were worth upvoting. Unlike question or answer vote counts, the "upvote" on a comment says nothing about its general acceptance by the community unless compared with (a) the vote counts of other comments on that Q&A post, and (b) the number of views that post has received.

As far as SnakeDoc's idea of renaming AU as "Beginning Linux"...he is missing the point. That would be like naming an Android Q&A forum as "Beginning users of Linux-based embedded device OSes forum".

Ubuntu is the primary "Beginning Linux" distro that most people encounter. And most people who encounter Ubuntu (and have questions about it) are beginning Linux users. Not to mention that some of them only vaguely know what "Linux" is, and because it doesn't pop up on their screen during login, they may not really know they are using Linux at all.

Also

As members of a community, your first loyalty should be to that community. When evaluating a question, you shouldn't be looking to push it off on some other site; instead, ask if it could be appropriate and on-topic for you, the experts who the author decided to ask. Be a bit jealous of your site - don't blithely turn askers away simply because their question could be asked somewhere else. Don’t hit them over the head with your scope, help them tailor their question to fit into it - and if that means your site’s scope overlaps a bit with another site’s, so be it. —https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/03/respect-the-community-your-own-and-others/

This.

Answer 3

I allow myself to comment here because I'm the one who asked the sudo related question. (It's not exacly an answer, but it was too long for comments)

I didn’t thought for a second that it could become controversial, although I kind of understand the issue here. As an none Ubuntu expert, I knew a few things about sudo, and the unix user system, but not enough the be sure exactly what's going one on my computer.

I was trying to get a clear, helpful answer for me and for some other people with no background in security using Ubuntu since a few years or discovering it.

I think the SnakeDoc vs. kos positions match the largest argument : Do we want to the Ubuntu/ ask.ubuntu community to be an expert only community or do we really want to open it to the wider public ?

On the first case, I might be of topic. On the second, I was definitely not. Because if someone using Ubuntu since 5 years (like me) ask this question, I think a lot of Ubuntu users, that might not be ready for the higher complexity level requires in other communities (like Unix & Linux), might want to know what exactly sudo is.

Anyway I got helpful and constructive answers, thank you kos, and others, for your help.

Answer 4

My clear opinion is that whether the question and answers apply to other Linux distributions cannot be a deciding factor in whether the question is on-topic for Ask Ubuntu.

Based on that I have to say that a generic question about Linux or a generic question about Unix can be on-topic on this site. (It may be off-topic for other reasons, but not being Ubuntu specific isn't one of them.)

The following are the reasons for my opinion:

If the applicability of question and answers to other Linux distributions is a deciding factor in whether a question is on-topic on Ask Ubuntu, a consequence will be that the next time a new version of another distribution (such as Fedora or Suse) is released, it could potentially change the scope of Ask Ubuntu. I would consider the definition of the scope of Ask Ubuntu to be flawed, if that was the case.

Sometimes knowing the answer to the question is necessary in order to decide whether the question is Ubuntu specific or not. Defining the scope in a way that requires you to know the answer in order to know where to ask the question is not going to work. It should be perfectly acceptable to ask a question on Ask Ubuntu without knowing about the existence of other Linux distributions and to what extent they are doing things the same way as Ubuntu or differently.

Finally a single question can have multiple answers some of which apply to only a single distribution and others which apply to many. This means the set of acceptable answers can be different if the same question was asked on different sites.