Except for the fact that he didn't know to do that because the documentation was incorrect. Not even merely omitting it -- no, directly contradicting the behaviour. To find out to do as you say, he had to read the Ubuntu-specific patches to the source code of the package. That is broken.
The man page is outdated. "Fuck you Ubuntu, I am switching my OS and bitching to the whole world about."
Then when they are in BSD, or Arch, it will be "Fuck you Arch" you don't have this man page right, I am switching OS again and bitching to the whole world about it.
Yeah I don't hear a lot of people complain about Arch and BSD and other "canonical" *nix systems. But it not because they are flawless, but because few people are using them compared to RHEL,CentOS and Ubuntu flavors.
Another way to look at it, if motd man page is what people are now mainly complaining about when it comes to Ubuntu, Ubuntu is doing great.
I don't know about that, I find Ubuntu to be far worse in this department. I blame their strict release schedule (April and October). Ubuntu LTS releases seem totally half-baked, with changes half working, and totally undocumented. Desktop users probably don't notice these things, but to a sysadmin their undocumented changes to things like motd and init are frustrating.
The Ubuntu man page he quoted specifically said that /etc/motd was a symlink, which should be all the info you need to know "oh, just gotta remove the symlink and put in a regular file".
It's more of a standard method you can employ on any Linux operating system regardless of documentation. But I get it, it's frustrating when you don't know how to use your computer.
