- 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!
by ofalkaed
12 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
by mahmedtan
2 subcomments
- 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.
by noufalibrahim
2 subcomments
- 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.
- 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).
by TiccyRobby
0 subcomment
- 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.
by shevy-java
2 subcomments
- 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 ...)
- 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
- 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.
by fodkodrasz
2 subcomments
- 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
by agoodusername63
0 subcomment
- 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
by agumonkey
1 subcomments
- 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.
by gucci-on-fleek
0 subcomment
- 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.
- I don't use Arch anymore, yet I still find myself reading their wiki from time to time. It's a phenomenal resource.
by elcdodedocle
0 subcomment
- 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!
by its-kostya
0 subcomment
- 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.
- Arch wiki is one of the reasons I stick to Arch as my daily driver
by nathanmcrae
1 subcomments
- Aside, but it's pretty neat that the author has been semi-regularly posting on their blog for over 20 years.
- gentoo forums & wiki initially were the goto place until it was deleted.
by GuestFAUniverse
1 subcomments
- 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.
by getpokedagain
0 subcomment
- 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.
- It’s one of the best resources out there which helped me learn linux
- 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.
- I switched from Fedora in 2013 because the ArchWiki was answering all of my questions. It’s very, very good.
- aaaaand you can download it: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=94201
by yanhangyhy
1 subcomments
- Me too. I tried various of distros before, archwiki is the best thing. I learned so much Linux knowledge from it.
by 31rf89e1f5e6
0 subcomment
- I for one, find that blue Arch Linux sweater he's wearing to be 10/10. Super cute.
- ArchWiki is great. Lot's of useful details for any Linux user.
by kittbuilds
0 subcomment
- [dead]
by huflungdung
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- This wiki exemplifies how broken Linux (on desktop) is and it's weird Linux fans ignore this fact.
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