Help and support

What do you do if you’re stuck?

While the distros have their own ways to hand-hold and guide users, all have loads of avenues to offer support and a large community that helps you resolve any issue. Slackware is the only project that has an email address where you can send general support questions. The project has mailing lists for announcing new releases and for sharing security issues, but nothing for support. Instead of hosting its own support forums, the project directs users to the very active Slackware sub-forum at LinuxQuestions. The project also maintains a list of companies all over the world that offer paid technical support services. In terms of documentation, Slackware has an online book that hasn’t been updated in quite a while, but most of it is still relevant thanks to the nature of the distro.

Debian, OpenSUSE, Fedora and Ubuntu all rely on a mix of multilingual IRC channels, mailing lists and forums to dole out support. Debian has multiple IRC channels, user support mailing lists in English and several other languages, and a fairly active forum board. The project has installation guides for several supported architectures, along with a detailed multilingual user manual. Fedora has a documentation subsite as well as a comprehensive multilingual knowledge base, and also publishes articles and guides as part of the Fedora Magazine initiative.

OpenSUSE serves documentation through a very comprehensive wiki, which has all manner of guides for all the project’s editions, covering everything from installation to configuration, and also has articles on individual apps, and howtos on several topics. Ubuntu also produces detailed installation and user guides for all supported editions, along with step-bystep tutorials on a whole host of devops activities.