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.
Content style is very casual. Screencasts are often 5-10 minutes long, and feature some dude with a headset talking directly to the camera while he explains how he configured X or got Y working. It's very much not corporate style training videos, more the feeling of your work buddy saying "hey let me show you this cool trick". Which is oddly comforting when you're learning the command line or trying to understand some new piece of Linux software that initially feels VERY foreign.
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.
Site allows you to search and filter by topic and experience level, and you can browse by programming language, by distribution, by specific tools, etc. They also have playlists where someone has manually compiled related tutorials - like "Beginner Python" or "Setting up a web server from scratch". Useful to try to have some learning path instead of just randomly clicking around (though tbh I've spent many an hour just... clicking around randomly and finding all sorts of random useful tips I didn't know I needed to know).
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.
Videos sometimes load very slow, and start buffering randomly, in the middle of a 15 second tutorial video. Might be server limitations, because this is a free service and someone has to pay for the web hosting eventually. The video player is basic – it has no fancy bells and whistles, there are no speed controls (not, at least, that are implemented in the player) and no advanced controls. It’s literally just play and pause buttons.
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.
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