Let's make Let's Encrypt easy and simple

[pfg]

@david7364

pfg, Two major limitations of the new certbot homepage, which you recommended above, are that it does not cover my hosting environment (Centos) and will not help anyone wanting to turn an old Windows computer into a secure webserver with little effort.

As @serverco mentioned, CentOS (as well as pretty much any other UNIX-like OS) is supported. Windows support in certbot is pending, but there are a number of high-quality clients out there that do support Windows and even provide things like automated configuration for IIS and auto-renewal.

@david7364

If LE is truly out of Beta, it should install a working certificate in any common server, and should have simple documentation for doing it. Any limitations should also be documented clearly.

Let's Encrypt (the CA) is out of beta because the infrastructure was deemed stable, and the adoption numbers showed that many people were quite successful in implementing Let's Encrypt. The ACME ecosystem has produced clients for all major platforms.
Certbot, the client, is still beta-quality software. It is now also developed by a separate team and organization in order to promote a healthy client ecosystem.
It is very much possible to use Let's Encrypt in any environment where you'd be able to use a domain-validated certificate from any other CA. In fact, it is significantly easier and can be automated completely in most environments, which is something that essentially no CAs did before Let's Encrypt. I don't think any of them would call themselves a beta service either.

@david7364

My criticisms are not aimed at you or any person, only at a project that is evidently too self-satisfied to bother documenting what it is offering to the world as well as other projects (say, jquery) are documented.

For every project like jQuery with excellent documentation, you have 10 projects with abysmal documentation. That certainly shouldn't be the benchmark Let's Encrypt or certbot uses, but I do think that the documentation that does exist is fairly accurate. Is there room for improvement? Sure, that's true for most things, and I certainly agree with regards to the "Getting started" page. Is it still possible for users with at least a small amount of experience with regards to programming, web development or server administration to find documentation on how to use Let's Encrypt on their platform? Personally, I haven't found a single case where a simple Google search for "letsencrypt $platform" hasn't yielded at least 10 how-to's.

@Appalbarry

As it stands now LetsEncrypt is really only approachable by people who already had the skills and knowledge to set them selves up with a certificate by other means.

It's worth pointing out that more than 90% of the domain names that got a certificate from Let's Encrypt never had a certificate from any other publicly-trusted CA before. If you'd like to share the issues you ran into, I'm sure this community would be happy to assist.