LINUXexpert.org Is Retiring, and Everything Is Moving Home

LINUXexpert.org is retiring. The archive is safe, every link still works, and I am genuinely pleased about all of it — so let me tell you what is happening and why it is good news.

The short version: the articles now live here on jcoffey.dev, the projects now live at coffeylabs.org, and the how-tos and study guides are being handed off to organisations that can do them justice. Three things that were crammed into one site, each with a proper home.

The tutorials needed more than I could give them

A how-to has a shelf life. So does a study guide. Write one against Debian 12 and systemd 252, and eighteen months later half the commands have moved, a flag has been deprecated, the package name changed, and the certification objectives were revised under you. A tutorial nobody re-tests is not a tutorial. It is a trap with good SEO.

Keeping a hundred of those current is a job. Not a hobby, not a weekend — a job, with a content calendar and a test lab and somebody whose actual role is to re-run every command against the current release. What I have instead is a career, the projects I build alongside it, and a standing appointment with sleep. I could write new tutorials or I could maintain the old ones honestly, and I was doing neither well enough to be proud of it.

So I stopped pretending. That is the whole decision, and admitting it out loud felt terrific.

The people who do this better, and they really do

Here is the part that made the choice easy: the free documentation landscape in 2026 is extraordinary. When I started, "the docs" meant a man page and a mailing list thread from 1998. Today there are funded teams with editors, reviewers and CI pipelines producing better material than any one person can, and they give it away.

For distribution work and day-to-day systems administration:

• The Arch Wiki — still the best technical documentation on the internet, and useful far outside Arch.
• Red Hat's product documentation and Enable Sysadmin — professional technical writers, published free.
• Ubuntu's documentation and tutorials — Canonical has invested seriously here, and it shows.
• The Debian Administrator's Handbook and the Debian Wiki — free, thorough, and updated release by release.
• Fedora Docs and the openSUSE and Gentoo wikis.
• DigitalOcean's community tutorials — an editorial team, a house style, and a review process. This is the niche I was competing in, and I was competing with a staff.
• HowtoForge — two decades of Linux and server how-tos. They always did this better than I did, and had it published while I was still building the test VM.
• The Kubernetes documentation and the wider CNCF project docs.
• Killercoda for browser-based labs, because reading about a command has never been the same as running it.

For certification and study material:

• Linux Foundation Training — a catalogue of free courses including Introduction to Linux (LFS101). I helped write two of the Foundation's certification exams and sit on the advisory council for a third, so I will say plainly: their material is aligned to the objectives in a way my study guides could never keep up with.
• LPI Learning Materials — complete, free, translated LPIC-1 and Linux Essentials courseware from the people who set the exam.
• Professor Messer — free, complete, genuinely excellent CompTIA training. There is no reason to pay for an A+, Network+ or Security+ course.
• freeCodeCamp for the programming and scripting side of the same road.

Every one of those is free, every one has funding and staff behind it, and every one of them will still be accurate next year. Pointing you at them is a better service than anything I could have done with the hours I had.

What I actually want to write

Here is what I noticed once I was honest about the tutorials: I was never bored writing. I was bored writing those. The pieces I looked forward to were the ones that had nothing to do with a package manager — the history of ARM, what happened to the semiconductor giants, The Cathedral and the Bazaar re-read twenty-five years on, why platform-agnosticism matters, what building a private game server actually teaches you.

Those were always slightly wrong on a site called LINUXexpert.org. An essay about DARPA is not a Linux how-to, and every time I published one I was quietly straining the name on the masthead.

So the writing moves to a site named after a person, because it is a person's opinions. All 117 articles have been imported here, front matter and links intact — the complete archive, searchable, in one place, no login, no ads, no newsletter gate, no cookie banner. Every article URL on LINUXexpert.org redirects to its new home here, so old links, old bookmarks and old citations keep working. The feed works too.

The projects get their own bench

The other thing tangled up in the old site was the code. ihasmail, Cairn OBS, stalwart-migrator, SysAdminAutomation, ubuntu2mint — real software, in production, with users, being explained on a page between two tutorials about rsync.

They now live at coffeylabs.org: one place for the infrastructure work, copyleft-licensed without exception, with source linked for every project. Software gets a status, a stack and a repository. Essays get a byline and a date. They are different kinds of thing and they were never well served by the same layout.

Nothing is lost

To be completely clear about the mechanics, because "retiring a site" makes people nervous:

• Nothing is deleted. The archive is here in full.
• Every old article URL redirects to the new one.
• The source for every project stays on GitHub, unchanged.
• The feed keeps working. If you subscribed years ago, you do not need to do anything.

Thank you, genuinely

LINUXexpert.org did its job. It got the writing out of my head and in front of people for years, it taught me how to run a publication, and a surprising number of conversations in my career started with somebody saying they had read something on it.

Retiring it is not a failure. It is what you do with a thing that has finished its work — you thank it, you keep what mattered, and you put that somewhere it can be looked after properly. The writing is here. The code is at coffeylabs.org. The tutorials are with people who can keep them true.

That is three upgrades in one decision, and I have not been this happy to write in a long time. More soon.