Expand Installation Instructions for Common Scenarios

[elsiehupp]

Problem

The official installation instructions do not elaborate the following scenarios:

• Major Version Updates are buried deep in the GitHub Wiki, and you have to click through the FAQ to find it.
• Dual-Booting seems seems to be supported by the installer but there is no reference to it in the user documentation or the GitHub wiki. Dual-Booting actually comprises several variant scenarios, including:
  • The user has a "blank slate" computer that they want to set up to dual-boot with Elementary OS and, e.g., Windows, and wants the "best practices", i.e. which OS to install first, and what particular issues to watch out for. (This is the scenario I'm in.)
  • The user has a computer with Windows on it and wants to know what's involved in installing Elementary OS alongside it.
  • The user has a computer with Elementary OS on it and wants to know what's involved in installing Windows alongside it.
  • The user has a Mac and wants to know what's involved in installing (dual-booting) Elementary OS alongside macOS.
  • The user wants to install a number of different Linux distributions on the same computer for the purpose application development and testing.
• The user wants to migrate their files (and ideally also their applications and settings) to an OEM Elementary OS installation from an existing Elementary OS computer (or even a computer with a different OS). For comparison, this process is highly automated on macOS, but it may be more involved on Elementary OS at this point in time.
• The user has dutifully backed up their previous Elementary OS computer using Déjà Dup and wants to restore this backup on a fresh OEM copy of Elementary OS (either on the same computer or a different one). For comparison, this process on macOS is quite similar to the above-linked migration process.
• The user wants to set up an OEM copy of Elementary OS using a cloud service such as Nextcloud to restore their documents, photos, etc., and possibly more (as above).

Because these scenarios are not well covered by the official documentation, people ask the same questions over and over again on the Elementary OS StackExchange and typically get anecdotal and unofficial advice in response. The best-ranked dual-booting Q&As are half a decade old, and there is no indication as to whether the instructions are still applicable to more recent versions of Elementary OS.

Proposal

The official user documentation, both on elementary.io and the GitHub wiki, should provide interlinked, searchable articles explaining best practices for the common installation scenarios such as the above.

Prior Art (Optional)

This sort of interlinked set of article may or may not be structured as a wiki, but more broadly it is called a knowledge base.

Apple, for example, has an extensive, up-to-date knowledge base in addition to its interlinked support communities (i.e. its StackExchange equivalent).

GNOME has a relatively comprehensive knowledge base, though it's in the process of being migrated to a new system.

Again, the above knowledge bases are 100% geared towards end users, who may have limited technical know-how, and are separate from their developer and administrator knowledge bases.