- is very important and relies on the community and helped by the ease in finding the information (the harder to find, the less likely people do it).
As an example, with this thread I tried to refer to the documentation. Spent awhile looking at the website, couldn’t find anything, then figured there would be a man page. I could only find this as I’ve used clr-boot-manager for a couple of years, but took a lot longer than if I just answered from memory.
One of my goals when looking at documentation for Solus was to have it in all one place, a one stop shop for help so people would look there first next time. This meant having all the useful stuff on the website (regardless of the quality of man pages or other sources). I’m not sure how successful it was, it likely didn’t cover a broad enough range of topics to become the go to for users (over google).
I think it was less that IRC users didn’t read docs, more than that’s where people ended up for support in many cases (before the forums existed in particular).
Should also preface that my comments/experience are more around traditional desktop users, many of which aren’t developers, which will likely be a smaller but growing segment now with the new installer. I would presume developers to be more inclined to refer to documentation.