We need a unified website for beginners

Posted by coercivemonopoly@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 20 comments

I'm sure websites like what I'm about to describe exist, and I even tried a couple of them, but they evidently aren't popular enough, and they aren't nearly as big as what I think the size of a project like this should be.

The Linux community and communities that are linked to it have a problem that significantly reduces their growth in members, intimidation. I believe most people in this sub experienced this by themselves at some point, and likely a ton of potential new Linux users don't even give it a try because of this.

As much as I like the vast amount of options we have as Linux users, be it DE's, WM's or distros, to a newcomer it all seems very confusing and everyone giving different advice on what to do and what to use doesn't make things any easier at all.

I believe the solution to that is a website that is dead simple, easy to navigate, easy to read and straight to the point in multiple languages. It should still let people know there are a lot of alternatives when it comes to anything, and encourage people to learn more about Linux, but it should still be very digestible for people who just want to be told which distro fits their needs with a pros/cons chart. It shouldn't be limited to distros, though, it should have sections such as "FOSS alternatives to proprietary software", guides such as "How to set up a VM" or "How to switch to another DE", "Why should we care about open source", etc. Also, I believe it should be almost Wikipedia-like when it comes to said articles, for example, a viewer should be able to easily learn what a DE is in the first place when he clicks on an article about GNOME.

TL;DR is, we need an all-inclusive website that you can easily suggest to absolute beginners.
Unfortunately, I don't have the technical know-how to get the site up and running, and even if I did, due to the ambitious size of the project, I myself wouldn't be able to write every article, but I'm really willing and hoping to organize a group of volunteers who are open to working on this project. If you have any ideas, experience or anything of that sort, or if you just want to volunteer with translation, writing articles, creating the webpage, etc., please reach out to me. I'm simply not qualified to do something of this size, but I believe it would be great for this community, which I love, and if we can get enough people interested in this, it would easily be possible. All I have right now is a raw idea and a dream, the only reason I created this Reddit account today was because a website like this would have been exactly what I needed as a beginner myself.