Just to be clear, was man installed but not man pages? Or man itself was not installed? I have found variations in exactly what man pages are available but man itself was installed on all I tested, and there were man pages available.
But if you have either no man installed or no man pages on Ubuntu Cinnamon or Mint, that doesn’t seem right. SteamOS is Arch based so I wouldn’t be surprised if there was no man by default.
Man itself but not the pages. Invoking the command results in a “No manual page exists”, and on SteamOS installing man pages (and the program) get overwritten with each update.
Real talk, can we talk about how frustrating that it is that man pages aren’t included in most distros by default?
Was annoying AF when I was trying to install non-flatpack stuff on my steamdeck with no database for reference.
Wait really? I’m a Debian user so at least the standard programs have manpages, but how do you live without manpages?
I think citation is needed here. I’ve never been an arch user, but I’ve also never had a distro without
man.I’m lazy and more likely to do an internet search or if I’m just trying to remember the commands, use tldr 😅
I just tested, Nobara (fedora based), Ubuntu server, and Mint all have
maninstalled.Strange. Ubuntu Cinnamon (What I use for my server), HoloISO (SteamOS, steamdeck), and my install of mint didn’t include the man pages.
I wonder if I had a setting that messed things up along the way.
Just to be clear, was man installed but not man pages? Or man itself was not installed? I have found variations in exactly what man pages are available but man itself was installed on all I tested, and there were man pages available.
But if you have either no man installed or no man pages on Ubuntu Cinnamon or Mint, that doesn’t seem right. SteamOS is Arch based so I wouldn’t be surprised if there was no man by default.
Man itself but not the pages. Invoking the command results in a “No manual page exists”, and on SteamOS installing man pages (and the program) get overwritten with each update.
Ah interesting, I wonder why that is. I definitely have man pages on the ones I checked.
Arch does have
manand manpages, afaik. I could have installed it years ago and forgotten about it, but I always use it without issue.I add them in post, it’s just a pain in the ass that they’re not included by default. I guess it’s a file size/constant disk writing issue?
But a chunky man page can be like 5kb! We can’t have hundreds of the things just lying around on the file system doing nothing!
Maybe for Tinycore, but not for Mint/Bazzite/HoloISO, please.
(I get the joke though.)