Ubuntu Studio's New Home: What's Changing and Why

Flavors & Remixes Ubuntu Studio
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Ubuntu Studio’s web presence has been spread across several Canonical-hosted systems for a long time: the main website on an old Canonical web server, the Ubuntu Community Help Wiki at help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuStudio, and the Ubuntu Developer Wiki at wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuStudio. Those platforms served their purpose, but each had become a poor fit for how the project actually works today.

What’s Moving

The main Ubuntu Studio website has already moved away from Canonical hosting and onto its current home. That move was driven by necessity: Canonical shut down the old web server that had hosted the site, so Ubuntu Studio needed a new home for its primary web presence. This has been a mostly transparent process and most users would never have noticed a difference.

The Community Help Wiki — the place where users have always gone to find answers about audio configuration, hardware support, the Audio Handbook, and getting started with Ubuntu Studio — is being mirrored and maintained directly on ubuntustudio.org at /help/. Every page you’re used to is coming with us: the Pro Audio Intro, the Ubuntu Studio Audio Handbook and all its chapters, the FAQ, hardware support information, terminal basics, troubleshooting guides, and community information. Most of this is outdated now, and we need help to bring it up to modernization.

The Developer Wiki — home to the team’s internal processes, release planning, testing documentation, artwork resources, and packaging and development notes — is moving to ubuntustudio.org at /wiki/. The full section structure is preserved: Testing, PR & Support, Artwork, Packaging/Development, Documentation, and Organization are all there. This information is also outdated.

Why Now

The website move and the wiki move do not have exactly the same origin.

For the main website, the trigger was straightforward: Canonical shut down the old web server that hosted it. Ubuntu Studio had to move the site in order to keep a public home on the web.

For the help and developer wikis, the issue was the editing experience and maintenance burden. The old MoinMoin-based wiki workflow is cumbersome, slow, and awkward to work with. Its markup is not standard Markdown, which makes editing, reviewing, and migrating content more difficult than it should be. Over time, that friction made it harder to keep pages current, fix outdated instructions, and encourage casual contributors to improve documentation.

Meanwhile, ubuntustudio.org has been running on WordPress for some time, and the team has been using GitHub for development work. By routing our documentation through a GitHub repository — using the Git it Write plugin to publish markdown directly to WordPress — we get something we’ve never really had before: a documentation workflow that fits naturally alongside our other development work. Pull requests, issue tracking, version history, and a low barrier to entry for new contributors all come with it.

What This Means for Contributors

If you’ve ever wanted to fix something on the old wiki and been put off by the process, this is your opening. The content lives in a public GitHub repository. Find the file, fix the text, open a pull request. That’s it.

The content is organized into buckets that map to the old wiki structure:

  • help/content/support/ — support pages (FAQ, hardware, audio configuration, etc.)
  • help/content/handbook/ — the Audio Handbook and Pro Audio Intro
  • help/content/community/ — IRC, mailing lists, joining the team
  • help/content/reference/ — resources, links, wiki guide
  • wiki/content/ubuntu-studio/ — developer wiki pages

If you’re editing a page that has outdated information, and there’s plenty of it, particularly around the old PulseAudio/JACK workflow that predates PipeWire — this is the place to update it.

What Isn’t Changing

The old wiki pages at help.ubuntu.com and wiki.ubuntu.com aren’t going anywhere immediately. Canonical maintains those as part of Ubuntu infrastructure, and they’ll continue to exist. Our goal isn’t to break any existing bookmarks or search results, it’s to have a home where we can keep things current.

We’re also not rewriting the documentation wholesale. The content of the mirrored pages is as faithful to the originals as it can be, with updates where the old guidance referred to software or workflows that no longer apply to current Ubuntu Studio releases.

Where to Find Everything

If you find something wrong, missing, or out of date — open a pull request, or file an issue and let the team know.

EDIT: I’m making em-dashes acceptable again — one dash at a time. :smile:

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Make a suggestion: If only the official website had a page showing artists created by Ubuntu Studio. If you can go further, use software such as flarum to build a community dedicated to communicating with Ubuntu Studio at any time (mainly used to publish various works of art, etc.), Krita has such a community… Don’t scold me.

Addition: I don’t know much about server maintenance, so I can’t participate… Although I have time to help with publicity and community building. As long as everyone can look up to me.

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I see the challenge.

If you have not, check out https://ubuntustudio.org/support/ Besides having a link to Welcome To Support And Help it has links under “Additional Resources” to a number of standard UbuntuStudio applications.

https://linuxmusicians.com/index.php links to what could be the exact template for the type of site you would like for artists or creators using UbuntuStudio in general. The moderator listed in the welcome section might be a good place to start. You will have to register and log in to connect with him.

Look into phpBB® Forum Software © phpBB Limited which is the platform Linux musicians uses.

Take a look at https://www.bricklink.com/v3/studio/ for ideas for displaying contributors graphics.

I could use the type of site you propose to trade ideas and methods in coordinating several applications in a creative project. I am often using LibreOffice: Write & Draw, GIMP, XSane scanner, Firefox and GimageReader at one point or another to achieve something I would like to share and help others working on similar multi-app involved projects.

A second challenge would be getting a link on https://ubuntu.com Flavors tab to UbuntuStudio.org. New users who not aware that studio help is in separate site could mistake Enterprise Open Source and Linux | Ubuntu where they will find the same orientation as https://ubuntu.com itself, which is heavily large corp technical and application creators oriented, anything but an artist, writer or musicians bag.

A third for you, would be finding artists and illustrators for example who also have creating their own web sites. You might want to start with looking for them in the Krita community.

This is likely the best I can help for now. I likely can do a bit more research if needed.

This kind of support is the sort that would help creative sorts get a smoother start and not have to reinvent the wheel when doing projects that need multi-application guidance. :+1:

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I also know of two websites that can be provided to Ubuntu Studio:

The first is Linux DAW, which specifically collects sound sources and effects plugins suitable for the Linux platform;

The second is Midifan（ 软件 - midifan：我们关注电脑音乐）, which sometimes collects content about making music on Linux, and you can also search for sound sources and effects plugins suitable for the Linux platform through this website.

Also, it seems that no one here pays attention to me. Can someone tell me whether I am not suitable for expressing opinions here?

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You’ve told me in the past that your native language is Chinese (I assume Mandarin?) If so, I’d like to introduce you to https://ubuntustudio.cn which is an unofficial community site that a volunteer has done. I think if the two of you work together, you can come up with some good stuff.

That’s a good site for looking for plugins. I’ll see if I can link it.

I think, due to the language, that would be best linked from ubuntustudio.cn since it appears to not have an English translation. Still probably a decent resource, but I cannot verify.

Either way, I’ve told the person running ubuntustudio.cn about you and your enthusiams, so don’t feel like this is going ignored. Things just sometimes take time and thought. :slight_smile:

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I also saw this website (ubuntustudio.cn) on the official website. Thank you very much for introducing me to the manager of this website. Indeed, I still have a lot of ideas. I hope to contact this website… Please also tell he/she that although I live in China, I can only find myself through bilibili or here (I don’t have all mainstream contact information such as WeChat, because I am extremely disappointed with the Simplified Chinese Internet… But this is the topic It’s an outside matter).
To be honest, I was very depressed before I got this reply - because I didn’t get anyone’s reply and participated in the discussion, and I thought I was not welcome here. Now I’m relieved. Please allow me to continue to make suggestions for ubuntu studio here, or continue to do what I can do.

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I hope you saw my reply, as we “crossed in the internet“ so to speak. I do not know how familiar you are with idiomatic USA English. However, your written English is excellent from a technical writer’s point of view (that is me).

I hope my suggestions will help also.

It sounds like you have gotten a good start and I look forward to your progress.

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I think this needs to be split off to a separate topic with a title like, “Providing Workflow Help for multi-application creative users,“ I am sure you can do better than I with that.
Your thoughts please.

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@nanochima uses a translation app.

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Are you replying to me? I have also seen your reply, and I totally agree with your suggestion. Another point to add: As you mentioned, while Ubuntu Studio is constantly developing, it also needs to find artists who use Ubuntu Studio (or potentially interested in Ubuntu Studio) and invite them to use Ubuntu Stu. Dio, help build the wiki of Ubuntu Studio, or promote Ubuntu Studio and so on. I don’t know what the situation abroad is like (maybe much better), but in China, there are very few people who use open source software to create, let alone use open source Linux distributions such as Ubuntu Studio… I also mentioned in previous posts that it is necessary for Ubuntu Studio for publicity - If necessary, Ubuntu Studio can officially authorize me as one of the fans of Ubuntu Studio to help find creators who use Ubuntu Studio in China, or potentially Are the creators who are interested in Studio (and invite them to come here to discuss and take practical action together)? I think I can help you.@luigiwriter2

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If necessary, I can open another post and invite potential users from China to come here to discuss how to help Ubuntu Studio (of course, the main language of the post is still English). I hope I fully understand your reply and ideas. My English and understanding skills are not strong. Sorry.（I am indeed using translation software.）

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…Maybe I’m wrong. Is this what you mean by challenge? I have seen it all and adopted it all. Thank you very much.

Sorry, my understanding is not very good. Please forgive me.