I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

https://k7r.eu/i-love-the-work-of-the-archwiki-maintainers/

by panic • 5 months ago

960 172 5 months ago

k7r.eu

dietr1ch3• 5 months ago

I don't use Arch anymore, yet I still find myself reading their wiki from time to time. It's a phenomenal resource.

canadiantim• 5 months ago

What are you using now?

dietr1ch3• 5 months ago

NixOS. Having a config-defined system is a bit too different at first, but really nice when it comes to system reproducibility, and being able to roll back.

It made maintaining my laptop + workstations the "same" a breeze, although it took a bit to learn and settle into something that works for me. It seems today things are easier for newcomers, but Nix Flakes are still "experimental", and thus the documentation on things might seem confusing or misleading sometimes.

gucci-on-fleek• 5 months ago

I don't even use Arch, but I agree that their Wiki is awesome. Unless my problem is super obscure (and sometimes even then), I can nearly always find an answer there. But the best part is that it seems to be never incorrect, unlike essentially every other result in Google.

mahmedtan• 5 months ago

I also find myself using https://man.archlinux.org/ a lot. It's much more readable/user-friendly than https://man7.org plus it contains man-pages from their `extra` repo which contains a lot of popular oss tooling.

nextaccountic2• 5 months ago

unfortunately there's a trend lately where many newer cli tools don't have a man page. they put up a --help and think it suffices

even though there are tools to automatically generate man pages those days

beej71• 5 months ago

I agree. If it can be launched from the command line, it deserves a man page.

wpm• 5 months ago

I should write a tool that converts help output to troff, even if the result wouldn't be as detailed and nice to read as a good man page it would save me the frustration of having to stab at "will i get usage docs with a -h, a --help, a -help, or running it with no args at all".

Ferret7446• 5 months ago

Because installing a man page requires root and a writeable root fs for that matter

Groxx2• 5 months ago

I suspect a significant amount of that is due to requiring more than one file (the binary itself) and having to learn about multiple packaging and distribution systems. That's a gigantic wall to climb compared to "put a binary on github"

Rayosay• 5 months ago

That's great! I didn't know that Arch had online manpages too. I frequently use https://manpages.debian.org/ for similar reasons.

uticus• 5 months ago

aaaaand you can download it: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=94201

backscratches• 5 months ago

Also available as a .zim file for Kiwix (which also includes packages of offline wikipedia <100GB). https://browse.library.kiwix.org/viewer#archlinux_en_all_max...

yanhangyhy• 5 months ago

Me too. I tried various of distros before, archwiki is the best thing. I learned so much Linux knowledge from it.

yjftsjthsd-h• 5 months ago

Not to worry: I try a lot of distros and still use the Arch wiki regardless. There are some things that differ between distros, but it's pretty generally applicable:)

201984• 5 months ago

Their wiki is what sold me on Arch. I ended up there solving most of my problems on other distros, and if they can make such a fine wiki, I figured they could make a great OS (which they did).

Doublon• 5 months ago

I came here to post a similar comment. I decided to use Arch because the documentation is amazing. And I wasn't disappointed. It's become my favorite distro.

beepbooptheory• 5 months ago

I was definitely the same way at one point but it's worth mentioning that the wiki remains a valuable resource even if you aren't using Arch itself.

e.g., NixOS just links to the archwiki page here for help with systemd timers: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Systemd/Timers

duesabati2• 5 months ago

Me too, I started with Debian but after a few weeks, I found myself being more on the Arch wiki than the Debian's one so I did the switch and never used any other distro.

I'm sorry to say this but Debian's documentation sucked a lot some years ago.

ivanjermakov• 5 months ago

Yep. Wiki and AUR completeness are hard to pass by.

ofalkaed9• 5 months ago

I learned linux by using Arch back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something unique to your install. This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet, I updated when I went to the library which was generally a weekly thing but sometimes it be a month or two and the system breakage that resulted was rococo. Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly, it was what drove the wiki and fixing all the things that pacman broke taught you a great deal and taught you quickly. Stability is not all that it is cracked up to be, has its uses but is not the solution to everything.

piekvorst• 5 months ago

I have started using Arch in 2016 and it was stable back then. Are you describing an earlier era?

Semaphor• 5 months ago

This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet

That does sound significantly longer ago then 2016 ;)

ofalkaed9• 5 months ago

This would be back in the 00s. I would guess that Arch got stable around 2010? I was using Slackware as my primary system by then so don't know exactly when it happened, someone else can probably fill in the details. I started using Arch when it was quite new, within the first year or two.

charleslmunger• 5 months ago

Not OP, but used Arch for a while in 2011, and at some point doing an update moved /bin to /usr/bin or something like that and gave me an unbootable system. This was massive inconvenience and it took me many hours to un-hose that system, and I switched to Ubuntu. The Ubuntu became terrible with snaps and other user hostile software, so I switched to PopOS, then I got frustrated with out of date software and Cosmic being incomplete, and am now on Arch with KDE.

Back then I used Arch because I thought it would be cool and it's what Linux wizards use. Now Arch has gotten older, I've gotten older, and now I'm using Arch again because I've become (more of a) Linux wizard.

benoliver999• 5 months ago

The switch to systemd is the last time I FUBARed my system. 2012 it looks like?? I simply did not even remotely understand what I was doing.

keysersoze33• 5 months ago

I've contributed 32 edits (1 new page) in the past 10 years, so despite being stable, there are still many things to add and fix!

Sadly, the edit volume will likely drop as LLMs are now the preferred source for technical Linux info/everything...

fragmede• 5 months ago

Depends on how AI-pilled you are. I set Claude loose on my terminal and just have it fix shit for me. My python versions got all tuckered and it did it instead of me having to fuck around with that noise.

resonious• 5 months ago

At the same time, I suspect resources like the Arch Wiki are largely responsible for how good AI is at fixing this kind of stuff. So I'm hoping that somehow people realize this and can continue contributing good human-written content (in general).

bdavbdav5• 5 months ago

They may be preferred, but in a lot of cases they’re pretty terrible.

I had a bit of a heated debate with ChatGPT about the best way to restore a broken strange mdadm setup. It was very confidently wrong, and battled its point until I posted terminal output.

Sometimes I feel it’s learnt from the more belligerent side of OSS maintenance!

vladvasiliu2• 5 months ago

I think it all comes down to curiosity, and I dare think that that's one of the main reasons why someone will be using Arch instead of the plethora of other distros.

Now, granted, I don't usually ask an LLM for help whenever I have an issue, so I may be missing something, but to me, the workflow is "I have an issue. What do I do?", and you get an answer: "do this". Maybe if you just want stuff to work well enough out of the box while minimizing time doing research, you'll just pick something other than Arch in the first place and be on your merry way.

For me, typically, I just want to fix an annoyance rather than a showstopping problem. And, for that, the Arch Wiki has a tremendous value. I'll look up the subject, and then go read the related pages. This will more often than not open my eyes to different possibilities I hadn't thought about, sometimes even for unrelated things.

As an example, I was looking something up about my mouse the other day and ended up reading about thermal management on my new-to-me ThinkPad (never had one before).

binsquare• 5 months ago

This brings back memories, same here!

I even bookmarked a page to remember how to rebuild the kernel because I can always expect it breaking.

ofalkaed9• 5 months ago

I didn't really get into custom kernels until I started using Crux. A few years after I started using Arch I got sick of the rolling release and Arch's constant breakages, so I started looking into the alternatives, that brought me to Crux (which Arch was based off of) and Slackware (which was philosophically the opposite of Arch without sacrificing the base understanding of the OS). Crux would have probably won out over Slackware if it were not for the switch to 64bit, when confronted with having to recompile everything, I went with the path of least resistance. Crux is what taught me to compile a kernel, in my Arch days I was lucky when it came to hardware and only had to change a few things in the config which the Arch wiki guided me through.

Crux is a great distro for anyone ok with a source distro and I think it might be the best source distro, unlike the more common source distros, it does not do most of the work for you. Also love its influence from BSD, which came in very handy when I started to explore the BSDs and FreeBSD which is my fallback for when Patrick dies or steps back, Crux deserves more attention.

doubled1122• 5 months ago

Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly

I believe this to be the entire ecosystem, not just Arch. It's been a long while since something like moving to 64bit happened. Or swapping out init systems.

ofalkaed9• 5 months ago

Most distros were stable well before Arch because Arch worked out most of the bugs for them and documented them on their wiki. Arch and other bleeding edge distros are still a big part of the stability of linux even if they don't break all that often anymore, they find a lot of the edge cases before they are issue for the big distros. In 2005 it was not difficult to have a stable linux install, you may have had to hunt a bit for the right hardware and it may have taken awhile to get things working but once things were working they tended to be stable. I can only think of one time Slackware broke things for me since I started using it around 2005, it taking on PulseAudio caused me some headaches but I use Slackware for audio work and am not their target so this is to be expected. Crux was rock solid for me into the 10s, nearly a decade of use and not even a hiccup.

VorpalWay7• 5 months ago

Other good examples: Linuxthreads to NTPL (for providing pthreads), XFree86 to Xorg.

I was using Gentoo at the time, which meant recompiling the world (in the first case) or everything GUI (in the second case). With a strict order of operations to not brick your system. Back then, before Arch existed (or at least before it was well known), the Gentoo wiki was known to be a really good resource. At some point it languished and the Arch wiki became the goto.

(I haven't used Gentoo in well over a decade at this point, but the Arch wiki is useful regardless of when I'm using Arch at home or when I'm using other distros at work.)

thr0w4w4y1337• 5 months ago

Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly

...a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor

Erenay09• 5 months ago

About a year ago, when I installed Arch, my first Linux distro, most things were great. However, while testing some commands in pacman, there were a bunch of Python-related packages (even though I hadn't downloaded them). Since I needed some disk space, I figured deleting them wouldn't hurt. Unfortunately, I couldn't boot again. I guess the ones related to Python were related to Hyprland and Quickshell.

shevy-java2• 5 months ago

I learned linux on debian first. The xserver (x11 or what as its old name) was not working so I had to use the commandline. I had a short debian handbook and worked through it slowly. Before that I had SUSE and a SUSE handbook with a GUI, which was totally useless. I then went on to use knoppix, kanotix, sidux, GoboLinux, eventually ended up with slackware. These days I tend to use manjaro, despite the drawback that is systemd. Manjaro kind of feels like a mix between arch and slackware. (I compile from source, so I only need a base really for the most part, excluding a few things; I tend to disable most systemd unit files as I don't really need anything systemd offers. Sadly distributions such as slackware kind of died - they are not dead, but too slow in updates, no stable releases in years, this is the hallmark of deadness.)

ofalkaed9• 5 months ago

Slackware only does long term stable releases but Slackware current is a rolling release that does not really feel like a rolling release because of how Slackware provides a full and complete system as the base system. I avoided Slackware current for years because I did not want to deal with the hassle of rolling release, but it is almost identical in experience to using the release.

grundrausch3n2• 5 months ago

I actually got a lot of Linux knowledge from the Suse handbooks, but when I was still buying a box in the book store because of slow internet connection in the beginning of the 2000. For Linux content nowadays the Arch wiki is still one of my most used resources although I did not use Arch in years.

jampekka• 5 months ago

The xserver (x11 or what as its old name)

It was XFree86 until around mid 00s after which the X.org fork took over.

streetfighter64• 5 months ago

back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something unique to your install

This was still the case when I switched to arch in like 2016 lol

Pay082• 5 months ago

Not to mention that they broke EAC only a few years ago.

assimpleaspossi• 5 months ago

>Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly

Only a Linux user would consider the instability of a Linux distro to be a good thing.

badgersnake• 5 months ago

If your goal is to learn how it works this was great, a new challenge every day.

Perhaps we need a chaosmonkey Linux distro.

Also FreeBSD did this well recently, migrating libc and libsys in the wrong order so you have no kernel API. That was fun.

encom• 5 months ago

You don't become a mechanic without fixing broken down cars. So in that sense, the shittier the car, the better.

My Linux story is similar. In retrospect I learned it on hard mode, because Gentoo was the first distro I used (as in really used). And Gentoo, especially back around 2004 or so, really gave you fully automatic, armour-piercing, double-barreled footguns.

gosub100• 5 months ago

If you choose not to upgrade, it is stable. There is no QA department for Linux (or windows, they were let go around 2015) so someone has to endure the instability if there is to be any progress. We should all thank those who run nascent software so those who run stable distros can have stability.

ofalkaed9• 5 months ago

It is the sort of mentality required to reach the place in computing which linux has. Decent chance you have linux running on something you own even if you do not run it on your computer and even if you don't, you do use the internet.

ambicapter2• 5 months ago

I had somebody’s pgp key break something yesterday :) learned about arch-key ring.

estimator7292• 5 months ago

Arch linux will still happily blow itself up if you skip updates for too long.

It's to the point where if I see 'archlinix-keyring' in my system update, I immediately abort and run through the manual process of updating keys. That's prevented any arch nuclear disasters for the last couple years

Cyph0n• 5 months ago

A thanks from me too! I do not use Arch, but still use the wiki as a primary reference to understand various tools. Two recent examples were CUPS and SANE:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CUPS

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SANE

myself2482• 5 months ago

I don't use Arch either, but both of those links show as visited in my browser!

What a concentration of knowledge. It's not always my first click for a given problem, but it's often my last.

moxvallix• 5 months ago

Genuinely, the wiki, and the AUR are the two killer features that keep me on Arch (not that I have any reasons to change). Arch is an incredibly polished distro, and is a real pleasure to use.

noufalibrahim• 5 months ago

I've never used Arch but I can really get the vibe here. Wikis (especially toopical ones) are social media of sorts. There was a strong community around the #emacs IRC channel and emacswiki.org back in the day. About a 100 people who knew each other quite well. And an Emacs bot that could read from the wiki (pre-modern RAG I suppose) and answer questions.

razemio• 5 months ago

I think with arch wiki it is even more than that. Before I switched to arch back then, you would consult the arch wiki for an unrelated distro, because it was (is) that good. Even the aur repository helps you alot, by checking the raw scripts, how to compile stuff. I can't make a good example but it feeled like reading vi specific wiki that helped you with plugin development for emacs.

VorpalWay7• 5 months ago

AUR is particularly useful because Arch has really simple build scripts. They are bash with some particular function names that you need to define (like "build" and "check") and a few bits of package metadata in variables. Pretty intelligible even if you don't know the format beforehand.

Contrast that with Debian build scripts which I never managed to figure out. It's dozens of layers of helpers for "common cases" with lots of Makefile magic. Completely inscrutable if you aren't already a Debian package maintainer. Very compact though.

ashikns• 5 months ago

Arch wiki is something special. It is astounding how diverse and detailed (and yet concise) it is.

enoeht• 5 months ago

gentoo forums & wiki initially were the goto place until it was deleted.

VorpalWay7• 5 months ago

I used Gentoo back in the day and the wiki was good, I even contributed to it at times. Eventually I switched distro (didn't want to spend all my time compiling), and a few years later I went to look at the wiki and it had become much worse.

Do you know what the story was there, what happened? Why was it deleted?

czernobog• 5 months ago

It was? Did they bring it back because I do see stuff on their forums..

I do prefer gentoo wiki over arch wiki from time to time as things feel less cluttered to me but that's just my opinion.

shmerl• 5 months ago

ArchWiki is great. Lot's of useful details for any Linux user.

nathanmcrae• 5 months ago

Aside, but it's pretty neat that the author has been semi-regularly posting on their blog for over 20 years.

rurban2• 5 months ago

Neat? I would use other words. Fraudsters rely on marketing. https://danielpocock.com/en/matthias-fsfe-analogous-identity...

kryptiskt• 5 months ago

That guy has a history of harassment in Debian, and is not a credible source.

foxrider• 5 months ago

I also use ArchWiki as my personal software configuration journal. I know I'll be back to it when I'm going to have to re-install or re-configure something, so I make sure to record any new info I discover, worked out super well for me so far.

Groxx2• 5 months ago

The Arch wiki has rapidly become my go-to source for every time I need a real answer... and honestly it should just become my default for everything Linux. It's astoundingly high quality, some of the best content out there whether or not you're using Arch.

So +1000, I love their work, and all the contributors! It's so, so good, and greatly appreciated.

Pay082• 5 months ago

A lot of pages are very bare or outdated, it should absolutely not be anything besides the default Arch wiki.

shevy-java2• 5 months ago

The ArchWiki is indeed pretty good. I used to prefer the gentoo wiki back in the days but I think the ArchWiki may be better at this point in time.

It's also interesting to see that many other Linux distributions fail to have any wiki at all, yet alone one that has high quality content. This is especially frustrating because Google search got so worse now that finding resources is hard. I tried to explain this problem to different projects in general; in particular ruby-based projects tend to have really low quality documentation (with some exceptions, e. g. Jeremy Evans projects tend to have good quality documentation usually, but that is a minority if you look at all the ruby projects - even popular ones such as rack, ruby-wasm or ruby opal; horrible quality or not even any real quality at all. And then rubyists wonder why they lost to python ...)

goku123• 5 months ago

Arch wiki is indeed the most informative and comprehensive of all, so much so that users of any distro should find it useful too. Two other distro wikis with smaller, but useful content are Gentoo's and Debian's. Gentoo's speciality in my opinion, is that it contains some lower level information like the required kernel features, and difference between setups using systemd and other inits. Debian wiki contains some information that's related to standards, development, packaging and quality control. These make them useful, despite the availability of the Arch wiki.

Though not distro wikis, there's also a wealth of information on the Linux documentation site and the kernel newbies site. A lot of useful information is also present on Stack Overflow. I just wish that they hadn't shot themselves in the foot by alienating their contributors like this.

Other documentation sources like BSDs' are a bit more organized than that of Linux's, thanks to their strong emphasis on documentation. I wish Linux documentation was a more integrated single source, instead of being scattered around like this. It would have required more effort and discipline regarding documentation. Nevertheless, I guess that I should be grateful for these sources and the ability to leverage them. While I do rely on LLMs occasionally for solutions, I'm not very found of them because they're often very misguided, ill advised and lack the tiny bits of insight and wisdom that often accompany human generated documentation. It would be a disaster if the latter just faded into oblivion due to the over reliance on LLMs.

skydhash3• 5 months ago

I used to be in awe of the Arch Wiki, then I found the way FreeBSD and OpenBSD does documentation. I found that Arch Wiki mostly has trick and gotchas explanations, which is fine for a wiki. But sometimes I would prefer that Distros provide a centralized documentation about the base systems they provide.

randomtoast• 5 months ago

I think part of the ArchWiki’s strength is that it treats documentation as first-class infrastructure. There is a shared expectation that if you solve something nontrivial, you upstream it into the wiki in a reasonably neutral, upstream-oriented way. That creates compounding returns over time. It also helps that Arch has a relatively coherent user base with similar assumptions about init systems, packaging, and defaults.

Many other distributions fragment their knowledge across mailing lists, forum posts, bug trackers, and random blog entries. That worked when search engines were good at surfacing niche technical content. With current search quality, especially the SEO noise layer, the absence of a canonical, well-curated wiki becomes very visible.

itvision2• 5 months ago

This wiki exemplifies how broken Linux (on desktop) is and it's weird Linux fans ignore this fact.

MathMonkeyMan• 5 months ago

It exemplifies how complicated a "combine software to make your own user space" system is.

I've been running Ubuntu this or that since 2007. Desktops, laptops, work computers, personal computers, servers. There has been some BS to deal with, but frankly with common hardware it's exactly the same as any other system. Desktop runtime with web browser support. Except that you can do whatever you want, if you choose.

The idea of Arch was that it's supposed to be hard mode, if that's even true anymore. Any non-tech person I've showed my computer is like "oo, what is that?" I say "it's a desktop environment, here's the web browser." And that's all there is to it.

miladyincontrol• 5 months ago

The idea of arch was never that its "supposed to be hard mode", its meant to hit what many of it's users consider the sweet spot of not being too opinionated but not leaving every single factor up to the user either. For many people that balance makes it in fact easymodo.

Calling it hard mode is putting it on a pedestal, a weird one that ignores much less opinionated linux distros and setups like Gentoo.

Mordisquitos• 5 months ago

I'll bite. How does a wiki targeted at users of a specific GNU/Linux distribution, a distribution which has made the express decision to be orientated towards technical users and not provide user-friendly tools for its configuration, exemplify how "Linux" (i.e. any GNU/Linux distribution) is broken on desktop?

(I use Arch btw)

itvision2• 5 months ago

This wiki is NOT Arch specific. A ton of advice and information is for all Linux distros and the Linux kernel itself, e.g.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU

charcircuit• 5 months ago

I agree. Every time I visit the arch wiki or forums for that matter its typically due to a failure of the way the software is.

For example instead of the OS noticing that zstd was not supported, it would always use a zstd compressed initramfs image and would require the user to manually configure a supported compression their kernel supported. I don't understand why they thought it was a good idea to break my install for something that should be easy to do automatically. One could say that there is value in the forum having information on how to fix my system, but this isn't something I should have ever seen in the first place.

https://archlinux.org/news/moving-to-zstandard-images-by-def...

duckmysick• 5 months ago

I wish there was a wiki like that for Windows.

reidrac• 5 months ago

Very useful because the information is almost distribution agnostic as Arch will stick to upstream as much as possible; or at least that's my impression as Debian user reading their wiki.

Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo!

johnisgood• 5 months ago

According to my experience, yes, it is. I have used Gentoo (using its wiki to install and configure), then after a few distro hops I was at Arch Linux and the wiki was a blessing and ever since I have found it (>10 years), I never needed anything else. Stuff they have on there applies specifically AND generally. Whereas Gentoo's wiki is usually specific IIRC.

lucideer• 5 months ago

Gentoo's wiki is still great (& Arch's has been great for a long time), but yes, Arch's is probably improving at a faster rate. Arch is also a little more comprehensive when it comes to mainstream tech that's divergent like init & network management - Gentoo's still good here but openrc & netifrc show their influence throughout.

account42• 5 months ago

I think the Gentoo wiki that gp is referring to is the old gentoo-wiki.info that went down after a hardware failure or something like that and never came back.

The wiki.gentoo.org we have now restores some of that but probably not everything - and there was a void left between them that let the Arch wiki gain mindshare.

rjzzleep• 5 months ago

Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo!

It is, didn't Gentoo suffer some sort of data loss which made it lose its popularity?

speed_spread• 5 months ago

Gentoo's source based approach was always destined to be less popular than a precompiled distro. Compile times & customization options select for a certain clientele.

xattt• 5 months ago

I get the sense the Arch wiki pages has more detail than the man pages themselves.

The wiki captures the knowledge that developers of said apps assume to be common, but don’t actually make sense unless you are bootstrapped into the paradigm.

kartoffelsaft• 5 months ago

Most man pages are written for someone who knows pretty precisely what they want to do, but don't recall which nobs to turn in the program to get that done. The Arch wiki instead focuses on someone who has a vague idea of what tools to use but doesn't know how those tools operate.

I've found that with an intermediate understanding, the Arch wiki is so much better that I often times won't even check the man pages. But on the occasions where I know the thing pretty well, they can be quite spotty, especially when it's a weird or niche tool among Arch users. So, depending on how you define "more detail", that might be an illusion.

bityard• 5 months ago

Man pages were always intended to be concise reference material, not tutorials or full docs. More akin to commented header files or a program's --help output, before the latter became common.

(GNU info tried to be a more comprehensive CLI documentation system but never fully caught on.)

QuantumNoodle2• 5 months ago

Anecdotally the arch wiki expands on the vauge man pages, often with examples for cases actually used by people. And they are much more easily accessible to modify and have instant gratification of publishing changes. Publishing to upstream man pages of a project, need to wait for it to trickle down.

ACS_Solver• 5 months ago

Arch wiki is far better than most man pages. I've referred to Arch for my own non-Arch systems and when building Yocto systems. Most Arch info applies.

In the ancient days I used TLDP to learn about Linux stuff. Arch wiki is now the best doc. The actual shipped documentation on most Linux stuff is usually terrible.

GNU coreutils have man pages that are correct and list all the flags at least, but suffer from GNU jargonisms and usually a lack of any concise overview or example sections. Most man pages are a very short description of what the program does, and an alphabetic list of flags. For something as versatile and important as dd the description reads only "Copy a file, converting and formatting according to the operands" and there's not even one example of a full dd command given. Yes, you can figure it out from the man page, but it's like an 80s reference, not good documentation.

man pages for util-linux are my go-to example for bad documentation. Dense, require a lot of implicit knowledge of concepts, make references to 90s or 80s technology that are now neither relevant nor understandable to most users.

Plenty of other projects have typical documentation written by engineers for other engineers who already know this. man pipewire leaves you completely in the dark as to what the thing even does.

Credit to systemd, that documentation is actually comprehensive and useful.

arendtio• 5 months ago

Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo!

Exactly my thought! 20 years ago, I used Gentoo, and their wiki was the best. Somewhen the Arch wiki appeared and became better and better. At some point, I was tired of compiling for hours and switched one machine at a time to Arch, and today, the Arch wiki is the number one.

dingnuts• 5 months ago

Arch and its wikin were already pretty good when it happened, but the real turning point was when the Gentoo wiki got hacked. After that, it never really recovered, and the Arch wiki must have absorbed a lot of that expertise because that's when it really took off.

as I recall anyway. can't believe it's been so long.

jorvi• 5 months ago

Interestingly enough, the ArchWiki itself seems to slowly be getting augmented by NixOS its wiki. Due to the way NixOS works, new packages constantly hit weird edge cases, which then requires deep diving into the package to write a workaround, the info of which either ends up in the wiki or the .nix package comments.

bombcar4• 5 months ago

The Gentoo wiki was (is in many ways) phenomenal, and I recommend anyone interested in the inner workings of Linux at least walk through a full install from scratch - you learn a lot even just copying the instructions into the terminal.

red-iron-pine• 5 months ago

Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo!

man came here to say the same.

used gentoo for all of 5 minutes in 2005 but the wiki was amazing and I referenced it repeatedly for other things.

generally heard the same about the arch wiki, too

alfiedotwtf• 5 months ago

Glad ours not just me. Had been using Arch for years, and whenever I landed on their docs pages, the first thing I would think of EVERY time without fail was is Gentoo wiki!

MarsIronPI• 5 months ago

Yes, the Gentoo wiki used to be the top, but it was an unofficial wiki and so wasn't backed up properly. Then it suffered a data loss and never recovered. I believe there is still an archive of some of its pages on the Wayback Machine.

agumonkey2• 5 months ago

I'm still somehow surprised at the implicit culture quality (concise, precise, extensive) of that wiki, because it seems there was no strictly enforced rules on how to create it. Similar-minded people recognized the quality and flocked to make it grow.

duesabati2• 5 months ago

I can see that too, this might be a reason for its success, all the articles are very straightforward and full of paths you may encounter

agumonkey2• 5 months ago

And it matches the mindset of some linux users quite strongly. We regularly see people relying on it even though there were other well documented distros, ubuntu for instance, but it's not the same (too newcomer focused, or too administrative in spirit..). the only wiki that felt close, was the sadly gone gentoo wiki, sharp and full of gems.

fodkodrasz• 5 months ago

I just hope they have robust backups and disaster-recovery plans, as Gentoo Wiki once had a terrible data loss, and it was like the burning of the Alexandria Library, I feel that put the distro to a decline. I don't use Arch (I used Gentoo in those times), but these collaborative knowledge bases are too precious to be lost.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44900319

redox992• 5 months ago

Wouldn't everything be on the internet archive? And common crawl?

aeroevan• 5 months ago

Being on the internet archive and being able to pick up from a restored backup are two very different things

myself2482• 5 months ago

I download the Kiwix copy of the Arch wiki every year or two, as my offline source of linux knowledge in case I find myself offline for some reason.

GuestFAUniverse• 5 months ago

As a Debian user I find myself more in the Archwiki. Indeed one of the top resources for power users and sysadmins.

The Debian wiki has improved (from a total mess to the occasion helpful content). Sadly it's orders of magnitudes away from the rigorous approach of the Archwiki.

embedding-shape• 5 months ago

Indeed one of the top resources for power users and sysadmins

Back when I was just starting out with Ubuntu, the Arch wiki was super helpful to gain better understanding of various things I came across. I think the wiki in general is useful to anyone who wants to understand things deeper, not just power users and sysadmins :)

getpokedagain• 5 months ago

I've had a Mac rather than a Linux machine at home for the last five or so years. Before that the arch wiki saved the day for me so many times.

Reading this has me looking for a junker laptop on eBay.

sevensor• 5 months ago

I switched from Fedora in 2013 because the ArchWiki was answering all of my questions. It’s very, very good.

hrtk• 5 months ago

Arch wiki is one of the reasons I stick to Arch as my daily driver

31rf89e1f5e6• 5 months ago

I for one, find that blue Arch Linux sweater he's wearing to be 10/10. Super cute.

alexjj• 5 months ago

The next question is then, "and where can I get one?"

elcdodedocle• 5 months ago

I agree. It reads like a cook book rather than a dictionary of tech specs. No spam getting in in the way of getting things running and getting things right; If you need details you can go to individual package docs from maintainers and project docs from devs, no need for misaligned redundancy. It is also pretty comprehensive, or at least I have not missed anything yet. And up to date. So, in my opinion, the best distro documentation I know of. And I like their community process too: The most trustworthy and reliable I have seen so far without a big corporation backing it up, except for maybe Debian. Let's keep the donations going, these good people deserve it!

mraza007• 5 months ago

It’s one of the best resources out there which helped me learn linux

TiccyRobby• 5 months ago

The quality of Arch wiki is the reason I could get into Linux. And that pretty much defined my career. So I, probably like many of us, owe a lot to the Arch Linux maintainers.

agoodusername63• 5 months ago

I am not exaggerating slightly when I say that arch wiki taught me how to use Linux

I’ve always been dabbling in Linux since 2007 but I never really felt productive in it until i discovered arch. And it’s outstanding wiki

QuantumNoodle2• 5 months ago

I really admire the maintainers' discipline with respects to grooming quality edits and fostering a welcoming environment. Incredibly patient folks in the interactions I've had.

easygenes• 5 months ago

I do like the ArchWiki, but have found that some of their admins suffer from the same sort of petty tyranny and procedural injustice that commonly befalls internet moderation staff. I have seen the moderators go on unprompted rants against users in comment pages, be met with patience and understanding, and then try to hide the conversation when it wasn't going their way, without explanation.

I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

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