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How does one go about finding questions and answers that are up to date, not 5 or more years old. I ask this so I can avoid the "THIS Question has been asked." that I see in every question.

This is not the stone age you know.

Just tired of spending 10 hours to find answers to questions that are relevant to the version of Ubuntu that is running at the time. My opinion would be drop the data base of everything 4 or more versions back, IE keep 18 16 and 14 and lose the rest.

And by the way, you know I am going to freak out if you give me that "This question as been asked" mesage.

EDIT

  1. yes I did use version number in my search.

  2. a lot of the time I have found that things are in different places. Not this issue but plymouth was in lib and now in usr. Or told in old post to use this command that you can not get in the repo anymore. So you have to search for source compile and hope you have dependencies.

  3. How did I get here. I was not on Stack Exchange looking for answers. I very very seldom come here.

  4. That one poster is correct, don't throw out the database but at least update it some how so up-to-date info is found easer. Was over on the orange web site looking for yet another new issue. firmware drivers error now that some update came. You know the only time I have any problems is when there is an update. ((well it seems like it anyway))

Anyway sorry for being a pain in the .... Latter.

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    The vast majority of command line question, for instance, are not dependent on the version used. Many, many questions asked years ago are still relevant today.
    – terdon Mod
    Commented Jul 2, 2018 at 12:53
  • There is some good old answer, but sure, all command line/solutions on older Ubuntu version aren't still valid; @terdon I think you can add a new type of flag which can be suggest on old question if answers are out-of-date
    – damadam
    Commented Jul 6, 2018 at 6:29

2 Answers 2

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I've found (when I used ubuntu) that even the solutions for older versions were either still relevant or gave me the tools to debug the problem myself. So I don't think dropping entire databases' worth of information is a good idea. As for finding answers for your version I also found putting the version number in my google search helped cut back on out of date or deprecated solutions, which I'm assuming you already do (if not then you probably should)

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More relevant and up-to-date content will be available in places where it is easy to find if posting it is encouraged. Sometimes it is equally as important to reopen canonical closed questions as it was to close them in the first place.

Canonical questions are highly upvoted questions about frequently asked subjects. Having open canonical questions is a way to provide a place to search for answers to frequently asked questions, however canonical questions cannot be 100% efficiently updated unless they are kept open so that updated answers can be posted by all users. For example see this Meta question: Need to edit the content of a constantly changing canonical question. As a result of this question, a closed canonical question was reopened, two new answers were posted to it, and then the question was closed again, but at least it was given an opportunity to post updated answers to it.

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