About external documentation

Danger

External documentation is not maintained by the Qubes OS Project. Content linked from the Qubes documentation was reviewed when the link was added to the index, but nothing prevents the content from being edited at any time.

Core documentation resides in the Qubes OS Project’s official repositories, mainly in qubes-doc. External documentation can be anywhere else (such as forums, community websites, and blogs), but there is an especially large collection in the Qubes Forum. The main difference between core (or official) and external (or community or unofficial) documentation is whether it documents software that is officially written and maintained by the Qubes OS Project.

The purpose of this distinction is to keep the core docs maintainable and high-quality by limiting them to the software output by the Qubes OS Project. In other words, we take responsibility for documenting all of the software we put out into the world, but it doesn’t make sense for us to take on the responsibility of writing or maintaining documentation for anything else.

For example, Qubes OS may use a popular Linux distribution for an official template. However, it would not make sense for a comparatively small project like ours, with modest funding and a lean workforce, to attempt to document software belonging to a large, richly-funded project with an army of paid and volunteer contributors, especially when they probably already have documentation of their own. This is particularly true when it comes to Linux in general. Although many users who are new to Qubes are also new to Linux, it makes absolutely no sense for our comparatively tiny project to try to document Linux in general when there is already a plethora of documentation out there.