I’m considering a change to the website, along with a change to ubuntustudio-menu to change the “Ask Ubuntu” icon to “Help & Support” and have it point to Welcome to Help and Support for our primary support venue, and linking this very category on the website and making a weblink in the menu as well.
In case you weren’t aware, Ask Ubuntu is somewhat unofficial and is hosted by Stack Exchange, and they’ve been less-than-cooperative with the moderators there. Historically we had promoted it since it was a bit more future-proof than other places, such as the forums or reddit. However, now the forums have moved here to Discourse, which is much more future-proof and editable, and completely within the purview of the Ubuntu community and Canonical.
Overall, the experience has been much better for the moderators and the users alike. Sure there have been some growing pains, but I believe our users would overall benefit from this as opposed to working with Ask Ubuntu since the only person from the Ubuntu Studio side of things even somewhat monitoring is me, and I can’t do it all by myself. This would enable an army of people with amazing Ubuntu experience to help users as much as possible, and ping someone (such as myself) when things get into the audio configuration side of things that might be over their heads.
We can also create wikis here that might be helpful for people to view, so I think this may be a boon to our users.
Let me know what you think.
EDIT: For those seeing this from the front page, this is specifically for Ubuntu Studio. Check the category before commenting.
Stack Exchange seems to be in a state of eternally melting down. I don’t think I’ve seen a month go by where there wasn’t some new change that got massive negative feedback, lots of upset mods, etc. I don’t hardly comment or write answers on SE (I still vote every so often), and at one point I abandoned it entirely after seeing one of the explosions that took place over the banning and slander of one of their best moderators.
Anyway, for whatever my vote counts, yes, moving Ubuntu Studio support to Ubuntu’s Discourse seems like a great idea. I’d also be willing to advocate for eventually deprecating Ask Ubuntu entirely and moving to Discourse for all things Ubuntu support, but hey, small steps first sounds good
My two cents -
I go over to StackExchange’s AskUbuntu website, maybe once each day, as I also go to Debian Forum, XFCE Forum, and Mint Forum just to see if there may be some issue I may be able to help someone with.
Since UubuntuForum (UF) closed last month I have been frequenting discourse.ubuntu.com website several times each day.
It is probably a good idea that people desiring help and assistance all be directed to the destination where they are most likely to get the advice they seek.
Many of the folks who migrated over here from UF, are most knowledgeable, and they offer good, trusted advice and suggestions. (They might be Gurus!)
Apologies, I thought I created a tag under support and help for Ubuntu Studio when I was adding the other official flavors but I guess I missed it because I just took a look and did not find one, there is one there for Edubuntu, you may be going to do something different but we did invision offering support for all official flavors, then if unofficial ones are added later that is good too, just need the volunteers to come with those other flavors that know the particulars for each flavor.
Speaking for Edubuntu (with that hat on), there’s not much different there than from a standard Ubuntu Desktop installation, just additional software installed and some software switched out (Geary, GNOME Contacts, and GNOME Calendar instead of Thunderbird, for instance). Other than that, Edubuntu’s support overhead is minimal.
Getting people to volunteer to help support Ubuntu Studio, in the nearly seven years I’ve been leading it, has been worse than pulling teeth. It was one of the first calls for help I put out. Unfortunately, most of the users have turned out to be consumers that seem to be unwilling to give back in that form, and I’m not afraid to call that out. That leaves just one or two people in our chat usually, and there has been no help on Ask Ubuntu for Ubuntu Studio specifically.
I can usually help on the strange little quirks, such as the audio setup, but there’s also guidance on ubuntustudio.org for the custom tools for those that are helping as well as the users.
With Ubuntu Studio being an official flavor and mainly Ubuntu except for the costume tools, I do not see a problem there most of our volunteers are familiar enough with the media packages and some have used Ubuntu Studio over the years as well I believe of course that part is from memory, mainly it’s the unofficial flavors that we will have a problem giving support for possibly but it is also great many users already in discourse have jumped in to help out, I am very excited about all the activity and support here.
I agree with the idea of replacing “ask-ububtu” with “help and Support” on discourse. It is the logical thing to do.
It took a little while to adapt to the new forum software and now that I am a bit more used to it find I like it.
@eeickmeyer I recall seeing a few people post about Ubuntu Studio on the old UF. Most of the time the questions were, for me at least, answerable if they related to things like booting or upgrade/update issues.
I think it makes sense that we move and integrate as many points of reference as possible to UD.
Despite some initial hesitation I quickly came to realize what an amazing opportunity we have here to offer help and support on many different levels.
As a very light and occasional user of UbuntuStudio, I’d be perfectly happy with this move. Experience in the past with Stack Exchange has been… mixed.
I have posted in AskUbuntu since Forums had security issues years ago and was not working for a while. I find the question & answer requirement does not work for the types of issues I typically try to help with. A boot issue often is unique and often not a simple answer. I end up converting it more to what I did on forum, but comment often is too small, but not really best as answer without more detail.
Never understood why AskUbuntu was first choice that Ubuntu uses to recommend for user help. New users often do not know what question to ask, so do not search for answers in AskUbuntu.
I too think that it is a great idea to move to Discourse, and to replace ask-ubuntu with ‘help and support’. Some questions that I have asked on Stack Exchange have not been answered, and I have regularly gone to other sites (e.g. linux musician) for answers (no slam against you Eric). A site with Ubuntu expertise would be invaluable.
My observation is the change is necessary if the support from Stack Exchange is less than what’s needed for easily running the boards. But unless ALL Ubuntu variants are changing to Discourse it will represent yet another forking of Ubuntu resources. And you’ll have the issue of having UbuntuStudio users with core Ubuntu issues likely coming to the Discourse first, then getting referred to the Ubuntu core group over on Stack Exchange. In that case it may be better to have two different help buttons in UbuntuStudio, one for audio issues that points to the DIscourse and all other issues that leads to the Ask Ubuntu on Stack Exchange. (Ask Ubuntu always seemed peculiar to me since it was an unofficial labor of love from the user base yet displayed “trade dress” strongly representative of Canonical giving the hint that it was official.) Hopefully any posts on Stack Exchange pertaining to UbuntuStudio issues will remain for a few years more until everyone has had a chance to upgrade to the newer versions of UbuntuStudio discussed on the Discourse.
@Linux4Me All support has been volunteer so there is no forking of Ubuntu resources. Additionally, Ubuntu Studio is Ubuntu, not a separate distribution, so please don’t see it that way.
I will be issuing a Stable Release Update to change all currently supported releases of Ubuntu Studio (as of this writing 22.04 LTS, 24.04 LTS, and 24.10) to have their menu options point to Discourse. The answers on Ask Ubuntu, for the most part, are getting outdated already.
Ubuntu doesn’t need the blessing of Canonical for the community to do something with the Ubuntu label (see the Ubuntu Hideout on Discord, for instance). It’s when the Ubuntu Governance, which is entirely volunteer, sanctions something and brings it under its governance structure that it becomes official. Ultimately that is governed by the Ubuntu Community Council, which is entirely volunteer. Canonical is the corporate partner and sponsor of the project, but does not dicatate it. That is up to Mark Shuttleworth, who then delegates to the Community Council.
Yes i know that someday someone should step up. I am trying my best for it for some years now. Certain things had to be better first so i can go on with this. I believe this platform can help.
It is also good to be able to upload pictures for illustrating for guidance on settings but that’s another thing.
Well i say it now: Yes i would really like to lead UbuntuStudio one day (now there is no turning back or a kogidragon will take me )
)
Well, there’s a lot to learn, and I’m not nearly done yet. 