[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [TurtleBot] Clarify on versions usable by Turtlebot

[Tully Foote]

[quote="pitosalas, post:4, topic:2133, full:true"]
Honestly I really want to follow the guidelines but for example I am not at all sure whether the "Question" I posed here was considered within bounds or whether you think it should've been posted to Answers.
[/quote]

I commented because I would have recommended that your question be asked on http://answers.ros.org. In general if you're question has a direct answer that can be considered resolved, then you should use http://answers.ros.org If it's an announcement that you want to share or a general discussion which you are looking for multiple people to reply to and start a discussion here is right.

For background it's mostly about being respectful of others inboxes. Posts here on the forums are broadcasts and go directly to people's inboxes. Where as http://answers.ros.org is polled and people have alerts setup on topics of interest that they would like to help resolve. The subscriptions to those are voluntary and greatly appreciated, but not recommended for most people.

We encourage everyone to subscribe to ROS Discourse General as well as any subcategories of interest so they can stay abreast of latest announcements and discussions. Whereas we do not recommend that all users subscribe to answers.ros.org, only maintainers and contributors who care about specific tags. The many volunteers who help answer questions on answers.ros.org are what helps make this community special and welcoming and their efforts are awesome! But we know that we cannot require that of everyone.

For reference there are a lot of debugging questions that we service through http://answers.ros.org and from experience if those get broadcast to everyone's inbox people will simply unsubscribe and then miss the lower volume higher value broadcasts. (For reference answers.ros.org averages over [17](http://download.ros.org/downloads/metrics/metrics-report-2016-07.pdf) questions per day. And with comments and answers that can easily provide up to 100 notifications per day. And if we broadcast that to all of the several thousand subscribers to ROS Discourse + ros-users legacy forwarding that becomes ~200000 inbox messages. And if everyone only skims the posts and archives it in 6 seconds. That would still be over 300 hours of the communities time spent per day reading the emails, without accounting for any effort used to actually answer the questions.

Instead many people use a polling method and browse recent questions on tags that they are interested in. And just follow up on unresolved questions. For if the question has already been resolved there's no need to look at it anymore. Whereas discussion posts you cannot filter them in the same way to know if they're resolved.


[quote="pitosalas, post:5, topic:2133"]
Could you post a link to that recommendation within the TB3 documentation?
[/quote]

In the TurtleBot3 documentation [Install Ubuntu on Remote PC](http://turtlebot3.robotis.com/en/latest/pc_software.html#install-ubuntu-on-remote-pc-desktop-or-laptop-pc) section as well as the [SBC Computer setup](http://turtlebot3.robotis.com/en/latest/sbc_software.html) both call out the use of Ubuntu 16.04 specifically.





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