Bug No. 602265: A forum bookmark

I have an Ubuntu gripe that needs … griped: To the best of my knowledge, there is no default shortcut to the Ubuntu Forums in a clean installation of Ubuntu.

For me, as a long-time moderator and as someone who relied heavily on the forums in my early Linux experience, that’s a bit of a disappointment.

Regardless of what you think about the distro, and regardless of what you think about the forums, it’s still one of the — if not the — largest Linux-focused forums on the Internet … and I have heard it said that it ranks among of the largest forums, period. (Of course, I don’t have numbers for that. Perhaps you can find some.)

In any case, I think a site of that size and with that much influence — and now with a five-plus-year history of helping people free themselves from Microsoft and Apple — deserves a better representation in the distro itself.

Any number of distros, from the smallest to the largest, make a point of sending users directly to help forums. Ubuntu should do the same … and lumping them all into a “support site” just isn’t the same thing for me. And yes, I know Linux’s traditional reliance on mailing lists. 🙄

There is, actually, a bug report that approaches this issue obliquely: Launchpad bug No. 602265. It’s been around for a while and was actually framed by philinux, another moderator, in the context that the default shortcuts in Firefox needed updating.

And on the whole I can agree with that. If it means a direct link to the forums, then yes, those shortcuts need updating.

Personally though, I am focused on only one of those links. To me it just seems like a good idea, and a worthy nod to a resource that has had such a huge impact on so many lives.