For on how to use GNU user-land tools (Bash, cat, less, grep, sed, etc.), I recommend the GNU manuals which are very well-written: www.gnu.org/manual/blurbs.html (example: Bash manual);
GNU manuals are also downloaded for offline read by default. These manuals are provided with info.
For GUI desktop, it depends on what Desktop Environment (DE) you use:
If you don’t know what DE you use, KDE uses sharp edges for windows and GNOME uses round edges ( 👁️👄👁️ ).
For system, as @Terumo pointed out, for system-specific stuff, there’s ArchWiki that has topics about everything.
If you want to understand what are the /usr, /usr/local, /etc, /dev, etc. filesystem directories, you want to look at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard: refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/…/index.html
If you’re a developer and want to find out how deep the rabbit hole is, you may want to look at an online book Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces: pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/
EDIT: Forgot this important material:
If you need to know command-line argument specifics for a particular program, use manpages (For example, to find brief information about grep, type man grep in your shell, and info grep if you need a complete manual).
Maybe tell us what you need the documentation for… Writing kernel modules? Installing distros? Configuring software? Archlinux wiki is a very good general reference, btw.
One of the first lessons to learn is how to ask questions.
The doggedness on tripling down on “I want to know everything” is remarkable but it is not going to get you a result.
Your best starting point until you are able to articulate a more focussed question is the Arch wiki as already suggested.
Do a bare bones arch install on a PC you don’t care about breaking (a very old one with limited hardware perhaps) while following the arch install instructions on the wiki.
If you’re a noob then you’ll constantly run into terms you don’t understand look them up as you go.
Yeah no it’s not, I offered some gentle prompts to help him refine his question into something that could be answered. As did several others.
He ignored that and tripled down with “I want to know everything”
That’s not an answerable question.
You have to want to learn before you can be taught. If you can’t listen to the prompt of “ok cool, you’re keen but pick a thing” then there’s no point me trying to help.
Yeah, to me it reads as someone who recently came from windows, where it can be more or less reasonable to “know everything” about how a user might be aloud to configure and use their OS, and doesn’t yet understand what it means to have a truly open OS
It would help if they had given more info, even if you want to know “everything” you gotta start somewhere, but even then, linux is very multi facetted, and it’s hard to teach someone without knowing what they know now
Are they already using a distro? If not start there, but if so and they’re for example using nabora then information on mint wouldn’t exactly suit them very well
That is to say, it’s a tough situation, I agree that they didn’t handle it the best, but I’m not fully certain how it should have been handled instead
You seem stuck on me supposedly not recognising he was a beginner.
I’d encourage you to re-read the two examples I gave as to what perhaps the questions he might want to ask were. I clearly did recognise that was the mostly likely scenario.
When they ignored the suggestion and came back with their “boil the ocean” response I responded with the only answer possible to an unanswerable question and pointed them to ground zero for linux knowledge. Install Arch and read everything you don’t understand.
Doing that process will force them to ask specific questions that can be answered.
Of course if you think there is any answer to the question of where someone should go to instantly learn everything then I would love you to post it. I certainly will be bookmarking it.