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The target audience for this manual is the type of person that actually *reads* a manual, and those people don't just click through a few menus to figure out where stuff is.
Honestly, I may have had the same opinion as you a few years back, but I've spent most of my life (working and social) around people who were, if not technically proficient, at least intellectually curious enough to click on a menu option in some random piece of software to figure out what it does. Then I went to work at a place with a lot of "normal" people.
Let me put it this way. The people in this office didn't use the provided Exchange server because when they started the setup on Outlook, they were presented with a menu that had the word "server" on it. Not knowing what that meant, they shut it down and, for two years, never bothered to ask anyone about it. These same people, when they wanted to bookmark a website, had to call IT and schedule a work order for a technician to come down and do it for them. Why? They didn't understand what "Favorites" meant and were afraid of clicking that menu option. (Why IT never bothered to teach them is a whole 'nother story.) This office's "Excel expert" created Excel documents with NO MATHEMATICAL FUNCTIONS in them because she was afraid she'd break something if she clicked the menu items and was so intimidated by the Excel manual in the office (one of those 500+ page jobs with more words than pictures) that she'd never read any of it. I could go on and on and on ...
I changed almost everything about the way this office functions with regard to its technology with a tiny, five page manual on how our basic software works, what a few terms mean, and an hour-long session on how to explore menus without "fearing" you're going to "break" something. To you and me, it was all common sense stuff. They thought I was some sort of friggin' genius for being able to distill all that down into such simple terms.
I think this manual serves a purpose and is written toward a specific audience that desperately needs to be educated on some very fundamental tasks. People are *afraid* of Linux, genuinely afraid of it, because it all looks so incredibly confusing to them and because Microsoft and Apple have spent billions of dollars convincing them that they are stupid and can never understand any of this stuff. They go to the bookstore to try to educate themselves, and one of the first things they see is a Linux Bible that, to the average person, looks like it requires a PhD in computer engineering just to open, so they give up.
The manual also has links to more moderately advanced stuff, and those links lead to other places that can be helpful. That allows for growth or expansion in learning. What we've got here with this manual is the kindergarten of Linux manuals, and a lot of people need that.
Again, I'll never use this thing. Hell, I hardly ever use manuals for anything. But I'm not the target audience. However, skimming parts of it, I was reminded of my very first computer manual, one I had for the CoCo back when I was 14. This thing is similar to that, and back then, without that book, I would have been lost.
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