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Given that there are recently popping up a lot of questions exhibiting poor understanding of unix basics that seem to be about Kali Linux and then are about reading error messages of any arbitrary program:

Should we have a canonical Q/A to be able to close them as a dupe as do the folks over at unix?

It seems unnatural to repeatedly link to another SO. Moreso, most of the questions are off topic on security, so maybe a close reason for questions like this is more adequate?

The most recent examples for this are here:

The problem being exactly:

  • the questions are usually off topic on here but may be on topic on SU or unix.
  • they should not be migrated because they often are low quality and/or dupes there.

update

I did in fact just now answer a low quality Kali question, because it was only in parts off topic and day-to-day usage of a live Kali does have security implications.

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  • If the questions are off-topic here, it makes a lot of sense to me to link over to the Unix post instead of having our own catch-all. Why would that necessarily be unnatural?
    – Arminius
    Nov 3, 2017 at 19:22
  • Because the unix post is basically “Kali is not for you, stop using it”, the Q is “why is no one helping me and everyone being rude?” whereas the actual question might have not even the slightest thing to do with Kali.
    – Tobi Nary
    Nov 3, 2017 at 19:23
  • My question remains - why have a canonical answer for off-topic questions? (What title did you have in mind?) The first post you linked is about using a program that's unrelated to Kali and the second one about fixing a compilation error. I can't think of a canonical answer that would have been a good response to these other than said Unix post.
    – Arminius
    Nov 3, 2017 at 19:30
  • That’s why a more specific close reason might be better. Hence the question. Maybe the consensus is that linking and closing as off topic is the way to go.
    – Tobi Nary
    Nov 3, 2017 at 19:34

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I'm not sure I like the idea of having a canonical dupe target for questions that are inherently off topic. That would sort of signal that those questions are in fact on topic, and I suspect it would cause frustration when people get their questions closed as duplicates to a question that is not specific enough to solve their problem.

I think picking the right close reason is imporant, even for bad questions, and in many cases here "off topic" is the correct one, and not "duplicate".

There might be a class of questions that are on topic that need a dupe target, but that class does not consist of all newbie Kali questions. So I am not opposed to the idea of a canonical question for Kali in general.

That said, I think this is a good topic that we need to think some about and perhaps do something. Not sure what, though. :-)

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