Sven, Thanks for letting me know how that can be perceived. I had not thought that my idea might bother anyone, and I certainly hope I didn’t make you or adw or anyone else working on this project feel unappreciated. Because you are all very appreciated, more than I can reasonably convey on a forum with no face-to-face interaction for social cues, and I try to make that clear when I can. I have personally seen some of the work you, unman, adw, and fslover have done in helping other newbies like me to do…stuff, constantly. I love that. I find people, like you, who are willing to happily assist others to do something over and over and over again to be impressive and I respect that. It’s part of what I do in my normal life as a teacher as well, because I think it matters. The team who program and script and build Qubes I find just as impressive; I am using this Operating system honestly, not because it is convenient for me nor because I feel I need it for my life, but in order to support that vision and to help further it in any way that I can as I go forward, because I think every new Qubes user helps to move the project (and open source software in general) forward just by learning, contributing, spreading awareness, and even just simply being a user who asks for things and becomes part of the base the developers build for.
Now, as for the documentation idea: I am incredibly new to Qubes…like just started using it daily 1 week ago, though I have been suffering through getting all my hardware working on and off for months to use it, and gain enough familiarity to feel comfortable that I won’t be left hanging with a dead computer by traveling with my Qubes laptop. So I haven’t seen anywhere near what you have seen of this project and its work over time. It might be that many people come on here and ungratefully cause grief or disrespect the other members of the community, or that most people never choose to contribute much beyond just being an active user. I haven’t seen enough yet to know. But I do know that with this idea, I am happy to spearhead it and in fact, that was my intention which is why I chose to use the pronouns “we” when I stated my original idea, because I do want to help build that documentation. I was quite happy when adw linked me to a page on how to make contributions, because I am really quite a skilled writer and would like to help add to the project that way. I have read a lot of the documentation myself already as I have tried to get my system set up the way I want, and I really like the style the documentation is written in: its some of the clearest and most well-constructed documentation that I have seen on a project. It’s certainly not complete enough yet, but what is there is generally great.
I’m also, probably like most people on here, an intelligent and very technically savvy human being or I wouldn’t be even attempting to and successfully using qubes daily. But I am very new to Linux in general and I don’t yet know how to figure out what packages or libraries are proprietary, so I may need some help in that direction before I can write up documentation on it. Probably the most appropriate thing to do is for me to make a new post on the forum asking for help to determine the proprietary packages, and then see if I can get some experienced linux users to help me with that. But any other suggestions are welcome. And I will certainly continue to build more documentation once I have that done too, as that has always been my goal with working in Qubes; in fact, my first project I had planned was to do a big write up in the HCL reports for the Framework Laptop once I got it all working, both here and on the Framework site (I almost have gotten everything set, but the AX210 card is killing me…something about the Virtualization layer). I may have to go forward with that without getting the wifi figured out after all.
So I will help build this out, but I do want to say, as well, that even if I or anyone else is asking for a thing without the intention to do it myself or themselves, I don’t consider that disrespectful or destructive in any way! I think that has its own value because it shows what other homo sapiens participating in or using the project are interested in achieving, and after all the OS is being built by a small group of homo sapiens to benefit themselves and the larger group too. Naturally, not everything can be accomplished or built by a small group (or even a large group), so if a request is made or an idea put forth that takes too many resources, I expect and understand that it will be ignored or tabled for another time, and that’s OK. I believe that an idea and an input is still valuable in many ways even if it never becomes what the thinker had hoped for. And certainly no disrespect or obligation is ever intended by me in my thinking or posting. I very much appreciate you all, even if all you’re doing is posting opinions or ideas, but especially if you are contributing as many of you are whom I recognize!