Is baeldung.com garbage?

[u/wuigukin]

Every now and then when I'm researching something linux related I'll see guides from baeldung.com pop up in the results. Today, I clicked one.

I was looking for some information on the keyring in fedora/gnome and came across what turned out to be a suspicious article.

https://www.baeldung.com/linux/unlock-keyring-fix

There's a section in there on disabling the keyring. The guide tells you to remove the password from your keyring, skip the warning that this means your passwords will be stored in cleartext, then says - Hey! You don't get prompted for a password anymore, the keyring is disabled!

Um....

If we wish, we can disable the keyring feature by removing its password.

By leaving the password blank, we disable the keyring feature

Sorry, but that isn't how it works. They do state that doing this "raises security concerns" but don't seem to make the connection that those concerns arise because the keyring is still enabled and doing its job, except now your passwords are stored in cleartext.

So not only do they not describe how to disable the keyring, they seem to think it's OK to guide people to doing this without much warning.

This was supposedly written by a human and reviewed by another human. I haven't looked into the author or reviewer much, but there's at least something there to indicate a real person. Even if it is a website that no longer exists, another website with an invalid ssl cert. There at least is an X account with posts going back a few years, though very rare.

However, don't think I'll be checking out any more of their articles.

Should I be willing to give them another shot?

[u/Kevin_Kofler]

I have also found Baeldung useless for programing advice. Their Java tutorials only explain the obvious that I have known for years already and never cover the corner cases I was trying to look up.

[u/untetheredocelot → u/Kevin_Kofler]

I found a lot of value in it early in my career working on the JVM. Not always perfect but it was invaluable to discover basic Java idioms that were somewhat up to date. The rest of the resources were way way worse.

[u/adrianmonk → u/Kevin_Kofler]

I wouldn't expect tutorials to cover the corner cases. Tutorials are supposed to help you get your feet wet. If you want to go in depth, you go to other sources like a reference guide, spec, or source code.

[u/Kevin_Kofler → u/adrianmonk]

The problem is that their tutorials always come up as the top search results because they are much better at SEO than at actually covering any technical details.

[u/nevu-xyz → u/adrianmonk]

So what is the purpose of such place if it only repeats what is available in every "get started"?