[mikorym]

I think the problem is not the lack of documentation, it is that people don't know what documentation is.

The iPhone 10 or 11 or wherever we are, does...

...not ship with a manual! Have you ever noticed that? In fact, documentation is the reason why people struggle with Linux, not the lack thereof. iOS tries to make things obvious. But obvious means obvious for some people and I assume they maximise for the set of people looking for a smartphone and perhaps more money than average, with some vague I idea of what kind of UI "looks current".

In fact, there is a story about a somewhat famous programmer going on sabbatical with only an installation of one of the BSD variants and from the documentation was able to make commits to the code... Maybe someone remembers who it was? It was mentioned on HN comments.

Having said that, yes, it is difficult to read documentation! And that's why people struggle with Linux, because it is a massive time investment.

[bitwize]

Sounds like John Carmack. I seem to recall him doing one of his famous "lock myself in a hotel room and don't come out until I've hacked something cool" things, this time with setting up and using an OpenBSD workstation.

And yes, one time I was fooling with NetBSD and went from zero to hello-world kernel device driver with just the man pages. So it's not surprising Carmack would be able to do the same with OpenBSD.

[mikorym]

Right you are! Here is the HN link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23224584

[watwut]

Developer documentation and user documentation are two things. Also, programmdr commited to make commits will put way more effort into figuring things out and into experimenting then is reasonable for user who has completely different job.