[cmccabe]

An internet search will give me many different choices of documentation of unknown provenance, authorship, official status, datedness, accuracy, and comprehensibility.

True. But the documentation for GNU programs, both man and info, is often also "of unknown provenance, authorship, datedness, accuracy, and comprehensibility." You even said yourself that the man pages for many of these GNU programs are years out of date on some systems. Official status is not guaranteed either, since anyone can fork an open source program and produce a clone.

Somehow, despite all that, we manage to muddle on. Probably, it's because we're humans, with the ability to filter out bad information and incomprehensible explanations, and find the real information. And in my experience, this is much easier to do with a man page, which usually simply gets to the point, than with a long, meandering info page which treats me like an idiot and yet often fails to mention vital information.

Thank you for the clarification that info pages can support images. Since I have only ever used info in a terminal, I was not aware of this.

In a lot of ways, info reminds me of Microsoft's CHM format, another HTML workalike with limited abilities. CHM can also support images.

Web usage may be monitored, but I suspect that searching for information about open source programs won't reveal anything about me that downloading Linux did not.