Canonical has launched a new website to help make ‘development and devops activities on Ubuntu machines’ easier.

The new Ubuntu Tutorials website features a small range of guides at present, most focused on working with Snaps, Canonical’s distro-agnostic package management format.

Speaking on its launch, Canonicals Will Moggridge says the the plan is to ‘broaden it to a variety of subjects’ in the near future.

“Ubuntu Tutorials is part of a bigger project to improve our documentation across our other projects. Our goals are to improve the discoverability and the ease of use for our documentation,” he adds.

It’s great to see Canonical tackling the confusing knot of technologies and frameworks that hinder development in the open source world.

Despite being the ‘developers desktop’ Ubuntu hasn’t always been the easiest OS to build or distribute apps on, with much of its developer documentation threadbare, rarely updated, or lacking in solid step-by-step examples.

The last great push on the desktop that I recall was the Ubuntu Developer Portal. Documentation on building and creating Ubuntu Phones apps came far too late in the process, and was no doubt hindered by the continually changing platform specifics.

The Ubuntu Tutorials Website is Open Source (Of Course)

Naturally the new Ubuntu Tutorials website is open-source, and the code is available from the Ubuntu Tutorials GitHub repository.

Canonical plan to make it easy for developers to contribute their own tutorials to the site (hopefully with some sort of vetting involved to maintain quality) and has made adding ‘functionality to write tutorials using markdown’ a near-term goal.