Which do you find most useful for support? forum? IRC? Mailing List? Documentations?

[RAV TUX]

Which do you find most useful for help/support? forum? IRC? Mailing List? Documentations? Books? Blogs? friends? local LUGS? LoCo Teams? Search Engine? all of the above? other?

why?

[madmetal]

i think two answers will be better.
for me forums are great to solve problems and irc is fine when you have some easy silly questions :-k :-#
;)

[Engnome]

Combine 1 and 10, searcing the forum with google:

site:ubuntuforums.org search term

The forum search engine gives higher priority to new threads while google gives higher page rank to threads which many link to.

[STREETURCHINE]

definatly the forums ,followed by google,
lol i never go to the irc chat moves to fast for a one and a half finger typist like me..:-D

[argie]

For me, so far:
Forums > Mailing lists (reading old archives) > Documentation > Blogs > books.

1. Books get outdated too fast to be of any use. Configuration file syntaxes change. Not worth it.
2. Blogs are usually up-to-date, but they usually fix a problem only in a particular case, and usually it's some workaround, and only for that particular situation and I just feel queasy using them.
3. Documentation is out-of-date. Too often.
4. Mailing lists archives are okay. You can easily see the date and follow the solutions in reverse order of date. Newest first. Besides, they have some sort of legitimacy because in my experience, they're populated with people who know.
5. Forums are the best. Easier to interact and get further help if something goes wrong.

[Josh1]

I mainly use the forums and the IRC, I don't post much but I enjoy reading and helping others (when I can) or asking questions. :)

[Dragonbite]

Definately Forums is one of the best places, then whatever documentation people have put on their own website (reached via Google) or official documentation such as Ubuntu's Wiki.

[G Morgan]

I'd say man pages are the best source for me mainly because they have as much useful information per line as possible. When I'm trying to implement a solution to a well defined problem I don't want realms of opinion but as clean a source of information as possible.

[qalimas]

The Wiki has been more helpful to me than anything else.

[Mateo]

search for how-tos and in the forum is good for general/common problems. if you have a support question that is a little bit different, though, you're pretty much out of luck until someone comes around who's either ran across the same thing and/or is really wanting to help.

[bigken]

Forum & Google ;)

[shining]

In my experience, it can depend a lot on which help/support you're looking for.
I've been both happy and unhappy with forums, IRC, mailing list, documentation and google.
I believe that for a problem concerning a particular project, it depends on the developers and community behind the project, what's their favourite way of communicating / sharing information.
Otherwise, google can be very helpful.

[Riyonuk]

I voted forum as I tend to get more help, in IRC if its a simple question, they will answer, if not they will usually ignore you..

[RAV TUX]

Interesting to see members' votes on this poll,...

[Dragonbite]

Whenever I am talking to somebody looking to get into Linux, I usually suggest "get a friend who knows Linux, even if they are far away.".

When I started with Linux I was so glad to have somebody to help tell me how things work differently with Linux and to help troubleshoot my issues. I was always amazed when I would describe a problem to him and he would come back after a few minutes with something to try (in the earlier years of Google). Now I find I'm starting to do that :)

Funny thing is that he hasn't been keeping up with what's going on in Linux news (the not-so-technical side of Linux) so he's been picking my brains for his next Distro to use, and programs available.

[henriquemaia]

From my experience, definetely forums, followed by documentation and then IRC.

[macogw]

Most forums, not so much, this one is very helpful. I tend to try Google first. If I get no luck in the first few pages of results, I search through here. If no luck, or if it's a simple question, I ask on IRC. I marked IRC cuz there's a less likely to be useless responses like a search will often come up with. Friends are another one because I have a friend who's very good with Linux and a boyfriend who occasionally is willing to impart wisdom rather than hording it (he prefers to hord it though).

[bailout]

Definately forums. I find it annoying that so many foss projects ie applications still use mailing lists for their user support.

[Christmas]

The forum seems to be most helpful. Documentation is great too, the only problem in this case is that I have to read lots of pages until I find what I'm interested in. I'm amazed with the progress the Ubuntu Wiki is making, for example I tried to find a program to convert from .AVI to .OGG so, obviously, I made an apt-cache search but didn't come with a satisfactory result. IRC wasn't helpful either because only two or three persons were actually on. So after the few weeks I read again the RestrictedFormats page which got improved, and found ffmpeg2theora.

[Quillz]

I tend to stick with the forums and wiki.

[G Morgan]

Interesting to see members' votes on this poll,...

To put it in perspective. The people here are naturally the ones who benefit most from Fora otherwise they wouldn't be here. The same can be inferred in terms of search engines, those who google are more likely to find here than those who read man pages.

Those forms of documentation also tend to be better developed than many others in the Linux world. The ones where people have decided against a type of support could be indicative of a weakness of that medium in Ubuntu rather than a preference against it.

What a Linux project needs is a sizeable document of the type you see in the FreeBSD world. (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/) The distro that comes up with that will see a large increase in usage.

[rai4shu2]

It may be a matter of the right tool for the job.

docs/wiki: basic info for n00bs
forums: generic help for most situations beyond n00bia
mailing lists/usenet/IRC: advanced help for serious hackers