Man pages are not the real manuals on GNU/Linux

Youtubers like Luke Smith and DistroTube have said for years that the man pages are the manuals for command line programs on GNU/Linux. That is not true. On the BSDs and other Unixes, it is true that your best manual is the man page, but on GNU/Linux distros, man pages are just short summaries of the manual to remind you how to use them while the real manual can be read with the GNU Info reader by writing info and the name of the program. All GNU programs and many others have info manuals that gets installed with the program by your package manager.

If you read the man pages for GNU programs, you will be underwhelmed if you want to read an actual manual, but if you read the info manual, you will find that most GNU programs are very well documented. I didn't know about info manuals before I started using GNU Emacs a couple of years ago, and I suspect many other newer GNU/Linux users don't know about the info manuals, so I thought it was a good idea to write about it. Maybe someone will discover the real manuals by reading this?

It is a good idea to start with "info info" to read the manual for the info reader to learn how to use it. On some distros, you have to install the info package before using it just like you have to install man-db to read man pages. If you use GNU Emacs, there is a better info reader with a nicer GUI built into Emacs which is used to read the Emacs manual, the Emacs Lisp reference, the Emacs Lisp introduction, manuals for all Emacs packages that supply one (which are most of them whether they are built-in or come in a package repository) and the info manual for every program on the GNU/Linux distro that supply one. There is a lot of good information in the manuals if know how to read them.