ShowMeDo is a website, whose users upload their screencasts and video tutorials about, mostly, Linux and Open Source software (as it’s name shows, it’s for the most part about showing users “how do”). It is entirely free. Which is, of course, good, if you either don’t want or cannot afford Udemy-like paid services.
The entire atmosphere of the website and the content of it are very DIY, homemade. Remember old YouTube? It’s older and nerdier. Linux users and programmers record their desktops, narrate on screen the command line operations they perform to achieve some task (most of them being related to configuration or software installation), or walk users through operating system or software features. The quality of the videos ranges from high to dire (yeah, sometimes the narrator sounds like he’s whispering into a mic covered in toilet paper) and it’s exactly because of the nature of the site like that. ShowMeDo’s appeal, it’s that “we’re all here to help each other”, “how to” compiled by the enthusiasts for the enthusiasts.
Topics are quite varied. You can find screencasts on how to program in Python, install Ubuntu, learn vim, shell scripting, Django, etc. Anything anyone feels like sitting down and recording. Quality of the videos is all over the place, some are super crisp, some sound like they were recorded with a mic in the bathroom (though usually the audio quality issue is due to someone using a potatohead microphone). Inconsistency is part of the charm of the site I think? It's real, not sanitized.
Tags help with that, but still it’s an issue. Users can also give tutorials a score, so you can check the comments to see whether the tutorial is outdated or broken. So in a way, the community has set up a crowdsourced quality assurance of sorts – it might not work if the community isn’t big or active enough to cover that specific subject. As for the tutorials themselves, they range from the very basics, such as install Ubuntu 20.04, basic terminal commands, writing your very first python script to … I mean, where to end here? It’s a Linux users helping out Linux users platform. It covers installation and configuration of services, basics to complex scripting, database management, security – all this and more can be found on the site. But very little of it caters to Windows systems or MacOS. This a penguin party.
One thing that I think separated it from YouTube (which by now has cornered the market on video tutorials) was the community seemed more like the home-grown variant you see on Reddit. ShowMeDo's core audience and content creation were specifically FOR the open-source community teaching each other. No need to be everything to everyone, so no noise or clickbait clickbait videos or other crap that often plagues YouTube tutorials. That focus really made the site feel useful, like people WANTING to share their knowledge. That being said, the platform itself has definitely seen a decline over the years as more and more people moved to other platforms with better outreach or at least better monetization options.
Site layout/UI is outdated. I mean really outdated - think mid-2000s web design that no one bothered to update past XP-era Windows. Navigation is fine, not terrible but nothing amazing. Video player is basic, there is a comments section, but it's not exactly active. It's a content site, you don't go there for the UX, really. Screencasts are from various eras, so some of them are very dated (Ubuntu 8.04 era videos still on there, so you want to make sure you check upload dates and are not following instructions for legacy software or outdated methods). Also it's a content dump so older posts are all mixed in with new ones.
Community participation is, or at least used to be, a big part of ShowMeDo’s charm. There were comments and forums on the site, a small but dedicated userbase. But these days? Forum threads are almost ghost towns. Comments don’t get replies. While the internet has progressed, a lot of users probably migrated to other platforms, or other forums, Reddit, Discord, Quora. There are a number of Stack Overflow sites, or subreddits dedicated to any Linux-specific or programming-specific subject, and the crowds have moved with them. Which is a pity, but means that in case you have a question, you will have to leave ShowMeDo and find the help for the tutorial you’ve been struggling with elsewhere. Niche resources are, these days, probably more so than ever before, niche.
That being said, for older distributions or legacy or otherwise niche tools and services, you can sometimes still stumble upon ShowMeDo being the only video guide that exists. Commercial services don’t have time for obscure desktop environments or archaic system administration tools, or programs. But someone made a 15 minute video on how to use this one application, back in 2009 and it’s still up there to this day, still accessible, and you need it? Yeah, ShowMeDo is that place. It’s become this sort of strange, frozen in time archive of Linux knowledge.
Definitely worth checking out if you're getting into Linux or Python or web dev with OSS stacks and you want that DIY kind of vibe to your learning resources. It's not slick or high quality production, and it's definitely not kept up to date so you have to wade through older material. Think of it more like a community library where a bunch of volunteers deposited their knowledge 10 years ago and you've just now happened to show up to borrow it.
LocalFlirt is solid if you're hunting for actual dates and not just endless texting that leads nowhere. The whole setup is super transparent—no shady subscription traps or fake profiles flooding your inbox, which honestly is rare these days (most apps are a total mess with bots). People actually reply here, like real humans who showed up to meet someone, and the vibe skews more genuine than those swipe-obsessed platforms where everyone ghosts after two messages. Communication tools are straightforward—messaging works, video chat if you want to vet someone before committing to coffee, profile browsing that doesn't feel like scrolling through a catalog of mannequins. LocalFlirt has this reputation for being low-key reliable among folks who tried the big names and got burned... users stick around because matches convert into real hangouts instead of disappearing into the void.
