The Arch wiki is one of the best things the Linux community has produced. It's like a modern, improved and more complete version of TLDP.
I haven't even used Arch on any of my machines but can't count how many times I've found their wiki useful for my workstations, servers and even custom Yocto-built systems. Arch supports many ways of doing a thing, so whatever tool I'm dealing with, Arch probably supports that and documents it on the wiki. And Arch makes few changes from upstream so the wiki instructions are often applicable on any distro. Sure, it takes some familiarity to recognize when something is e.g. Debian-specific and should be done in a Debian way, but as a user fairly familiar with Linux, I often find Arch to be the best source of documentation.
jsight 1 hours ago [-]
This sounds exactly like what we used to say about Gentoo back in its early days.
packetlost 29 minutes ago [-]
This was still the case of Gentoo until they wiped/lost their wiki and didn't have proper backups.
dlachausse 2 hours ago [-]
After using FreeBSD and OpenBSD, it is frankly shocking how bad Linux documentation is in comparison. On the BSDs every command, every program, every system call, and every configuration file are thoroughly documented in man pages and other guides. The FreeBSD Handbook in particular is a treasure. It more than makes up for some of the more difficult aspects of the OS by providing thorough and approachable documentation.
noirscape 58 minutes ago [-]
It's a different model of development, leading to different expectations.
BSD ties the kernel and the software on top of it together pretty heavily, creating the expectation that the documentation should cover all of it.
Linux is meanwhile kernel and software kept separated, meaning that the documentation usually winds up assembled from separate tools, each with their own standards.
19 minutes ago [-]
bongodongobob 6 minutes ago [-]
Linux != software that runs on Linux. Those are two completely different things.
bitwize 2 hours ago [-]
I learned how to do NetBSD kernel hacking from just the man pages. They're still my first-line documentation on the NetBSD file system work I'm doing. The state of Linux documentation is appalling by contrast.
sbinnee 1 hours ago [-]
I can't agree more
homebrewer 4 hours ago [-]
Instead of creating multiple wikis with probably 80% of duplicate information between them, it would be great to have a cross distribution wiki with separate sections for distribution-specific instructions where it makes sense. Gentoo had a fantastic wiki before they lost it to disk array failure (IIRC) around ten years ago, now pretty much everyone is going to the Arch wiki, why not try to turn it into a shared project?
layer8 2 minutes ago [-]
There are not just differences between distributions to consider, but also different distributions being on different versions of things. This would be difficult to organize.
kbolino 50 minutes ago [-]
What matters in the long run for making a good wiki are the people and policies.
Young and niche wikis are happy to take any contributions they can get. The quality and timeliness of any given bit of text soon ends up wildly different from page to page or even section to section. Some people may decide to take their time not just contributing new content but also editing existing content. However, it becomes difficult to balance creation vs. curation. Too much creation, and the editors get overwhelmed, and then the users can never be sure what to trust, and so the wiki becomes irrelevant. Too much curation, and the information becomes uniformly stale and lowest-common-denominator, so the users start going elsewhere, and so the wiki becomes irrelevant.
Different wikis means each one can have its own people and policies. If the people who made one wiki great leave, there are still other wikis out there. If the policies choke the life out of one wiki, there are still other wikis out there. Some wiki can be full of deletionists while another wiki is full of inclusionists. Some wiki can be full of mergers while another wiki is full of splitters.
Forcing everybody onto one wiki forces them all to work together, but this is an entirely volunteer effort, and so many will just leave. Even if they were paid, some individuals would dominate while others would get crowded out. One can point to Wikipedia as a glaring exception, standing as basically the only wiki of note of its kind, but I think it's the exception that proves the rule.
haunter 3 hours ago [-]
>Instead of creating multiple wikis with probably 80% of duplicate information between them
>why not try to turn it into a shared project?
This is basically both the highlight and the bane of the Linux world.
Why have another DE when there are already multiple ones? [0]
Why have another package manager when there are already multiple ones? [1]
Why have another distro when there are already multiple ones? [2]
So having another wiki makes perfect sense (or not depending on your POV)
I remember a while ago there was a small computer vision wiki that was very useful and somewhat widely used, not that many computer vision people at the time. Then, after around 2010 they decided to move the wiki to Wikipedia. You can guess what happened, original wiki was gone, very few articles survived because, of course, it's Wikipedia. A great resource just gone.
slightwinder 3 hours ago [-]
It probably just never worked out that way. Usually everyone starts with documenting the distro-specific parts first, and then adds more and more, until even general parts are there. But at the same time, everyone probably thinks that those general parts are supposed in the specific projects' documentation, so nobody really cares about sharing. Until the point is reached that some wiki is so big and successful, that it just silently took over the whole domain.
Also, the whole sharing somehow seems to have died off over the decades. 25+ years ago, when wiki was new and shiny and everyone was experimental and motivated, there were strong movements for interwiki-content, sharing stuff between them openly. Then time happened, not much sharing was done, and every wiki-software slowly moved on, doing their own thing, becoming some semi-open silo or even a closed garden.
And today we had this same movement arising in the knowledge management-community, around their tools, and mainly in the context of Markdown, and it also kinda died down and never turned into anything substantial. Maybe, in the end, sharing information and knowledge is a bit harder to execute than it seems?
zdragnar 2 hours ago [-]
I think the sharing is easy. The maintaining is hard when there isn't clear ownership. How do the teams divide maintenance duties? How are vandalism and moderation dealt with across teams? How do disagreements between teams over style and quality dealt with? Cost of hosting split?
All of these are possible to answer, but they are also much easier to deal with when you're not sharing between different organizations.
slightwinder 2 hours ago [-]
> I think the sharing is easy
The hard part about sharing is the different syntax of wikis, which could be slightly different even in the same wiki-software. Then there is the organization-part, and the sync-process itself.
Of course, today, 25 years later, we do have better solutions and much more experience for those problems.
> The maintaining is hard when there isn't clear ownership. How do the teams divide maintenance duties? How are vandalism and moderation dealt with across teams?
I would think those are pretty simply, as they all follow the same rules. I mean, handling vandalism isn't much different between Arch or Debian, it's always the same. And moderation really depends on the chosen sharing-mechanism. Which brings up again the hard part, just on a different level.
kelvinjps10 45 minutes ago [-]
I think it's more of, let's say, unify the 2 wikis in one, what team should moderate Debian's or Arch's, and which rules should be applied Debian's or Arch's?
lukan 2 hours ago [-]
"Maybe, in the end, sharing information and knowledge is a bit harder to execute than it seems?"
Or ... instead of admitting something, we can also just find a scapegoat instead. Let's say bad coorporations somehow prevented it?
On the other hand, sharing information is easy.
The hard part is in trusting that information in the time and age of spam, propaganda and advertisers. And companies are quite secretive and don't want to share too much by default for other reasons.
Also it is way easier just do something to your own wiki, than coordinate with dozens of others where you share something.
I have many vague and some concrete ideas since a while about building trust right into the wiki system somehow, but never got around to actually implement something. Because ah well, I have to admit. It really ain't trivial after all, solving human trust.
slightwinder 2 hours ago [-]
> Let's say bad coorporations somehow prevented it?
How?
> On the other hand, sharing information is easy.
Not in the way we are talking about.
> The hard part is in trusting that information in the time and age of spam
No, it's not. We're talking here about moderated Knowledge bases. Of course, if it's a poor or even unmoderated wiki, this would be a problem. But I've never got the impression that Arch-wiki had this problem.
> don't want to share too much by default for other reasons.
Sharing what? This is about open source? Is this AI-slope? O_o
> Also it is way easier just do something to your own wiki, than coordinate with dozens of others where you share something.
I don't think Arch-Wiki has only one maintainer.
lukan 1 hours ago [-]
"Sharing what? This is about open source?"
About sharing information in general.
Wikis work in a open way, if they are niche, to not attract trolls or spam too much, otherwise they work by restricting guest rights, banning ip, etc.
Usually pragmatically.
"No, it's not. We're talking here about moderated Knowledge bases. Of course, if it's a poor or even unmoderated wiki, this would be a problem. But I've never got the impression that Arch-wiki had this problem."
And arch wiki (and wikipedia itself) is a outlier, not the average wiki, that usually is outdated or plain wrong with no one caring.
WhyNotHugo 59 minutes ago [-]
> Instead of creating multiple wikis with probably 80% of duplicate information between them
Wikis do tend to link a lot across one another. On the Alpine Wiki, I prefer to link to the ArchWiki when applicable, rather than copy content over.
wolvesechoes 3 hours ago [-]
What would be even better - just a single, unified distro. Imagine if all those man-hours where actually focused on delivering a single working and polished FOSS OS.
I know, FOSS is all about choice, yada yada.
tremon 2 hours ago [-]
Then you get to handle all the same criticisms that are usually lobbed at MS Office: no single user ever needs more than 15% of the functionality, but still receives the additional baggage of the other 85% -- whether in terms of memory footprint, reduced performance or UI clutter. The ability of FOSS to be optimized for specific use cases is one of its biggest strengths, and that has nothing to do with "choice" itself, no matter how much you try to disparage it.
wolvesechoes 2 hours ago [-]
And I thought that free software is about human freedom.
Well, enjoy your optimized memory consumption instead.
const_cast 16 minutes ago [-]
Human freedom includes the freedom to fork.
What you're proposing is actually making the Linux kernel and userland closed source and controlled by a company like Microsoft.
There is simply no other way to get "one distro"
tremon 32 minutes ago [-]
I'm not sure I understand your position. You seem to be saying that allowing customization is bad for human freedom? Would you mind ELI5'ing that for me?
jsight 59 minutes ago [-]
Yep, and who cares about the FOSS OS part? We could combine Macos and Windows too! Think of all the money and time that could be saved by having a single global unified OS team!
I know, people have difference preferences, yada yada.
wolvesechoes 55 minutes ago [-]
> We could combine Macos and Windows too!
It wouldn't produce a FOSS OS, as they are not FOSS.
Try more.
WD-42 1 hours ago [-]
You realize people do this for fun right? It’s fun to create your own distro (you should try it some time) and it’s fun to play with different ones as well.
Nobody wants Linux to be more like windows, and otherwise they’d just use windows.
wolvesechoes 53 minutes ago [-]
> You realize people do this for fun right? It’s fun to create your own distro (you should try it some time) and it’s fun to play with different ones as well.
I do, and this is why FOSS cannot reach its political goals - it won't ensure user's freedom, for almost everyone involved today would rather chase their own satisfaction.
pessimizer 49 minutes ago [-]
It already insures user freedom, and has for decades. The lecturing is a bad tone. You wouldn't even know this was possible if GNU, Debian, and Linux in general hadn't done it. They shaped your understanding of software.
wolvesechoes 3 minutes ago [-]
I have no issue with GNU, Linux or Debian. The opposite, I am postulating that we would all be better if every one worked on those instead of creating yet another distro or grep clone, even if they provide their creators with satisfaction.
pessimizer 51 minutes ago [-]
Some corporate entity will just take it over and Linux will just be another piece of software constantly trying to figure out ways to rob you.
Fragmentation, though ugly and inconvenient, works as a defense. systemd, along with all of the other goofy all-encompassing subsystems that were inflicted on Linux over one hot decade from Red Hat, was obviously a ploy to do the above. The jury is still out as to whether it will be successful.
bitwize 1 hours ago [-]
That's part of what systemd is supposed to do: make distros irrelevant by providing a uniform software base, after which redundant distros would wither and die, yielding a few main ones which are cross-compatible with one another in terms of how they are configured.
kzrdude 3 hours ago [-]
If the scope is too wide, then it's hard to see when content is outdated or irrelevant. The clear focus helps archwiki for example to not turn into a graveyard of obsolete howtos.
noirscape 4 hours ago [-]
In the case of Debian, they have a pretty different stance when it comes to what the role of a distro is compared to Arch.
Arch is essentially completely freeform; you, the user, are going to be making a lot of technical decisions on what you want your system to look like. It's perfectly okay for Arch to ship 4 different versions of the same type of tool, as long as all 4 are being used. The Arch wiki reflects this; it's focused around giving you a lot of options, while not going too in-depth on what you'd want to do with them. Want to swap out NetworkManager for wpa_supplicant because wpa_supplicant is easier to configure from a terminal? Perfectly fine, go ahead. Most arch packages as a result don't heavily deviate from upstream unless it's absolutely necessary to get them running.
Debian uh... isn't that. Debian still offers choice, but Debian has set the unenviable goal for themselves to provide a "stable" userland experience. This means Debian offers less options, but the options they do offer are also fixed on certain versions with sometimes pretty derivative versions compares to upstream. Their documentation as a result can get much more in-depth, just by virtue of having less to cover than Arch does.
A basic example here is setting up a webserver stack (so webserver, php and mysql); on Debian, you pick between apache2(+mod_php) or nginx/php-fpm and install mysql. Debian takes care of wiring all the permissions, user groups and all that stuff and giving you a "sane" default folder capable of serving PHP scripts on port 80 that anyone can use. It's a lot easier and nginx' configuration is specifically changed to resemble the apache2 vhosts. Arch doesn't do this; arch gives you the upstream versions of all these packages and then asks you to wire them together so that they work.
It means they attract pretty different audiences as a result; Debian users value stability/set and forget (also helped by Debian release cycles basically lasting the same length as most LTS releases of other distros), while Arch users are more conditioned to having to occasionally change their config files on updates.
That's also reflected in what their wikis aim at. Debian wikis generally can be version locked to their release; Arch wiki needs constant updating as things change.
They're different extremes here; most distros usually sit on one side or the other of this sorta thing (with the only real correlation being that dpkg-based distros usually lean more towards the Debian model), but there's also the pseudo-rolling release distros like Fedora, which try to offer similar stability to Debian but much shorter release cycles, so you'll always be running something at least close to the latest version.
pessimizer 45 minutes ago [-]
> Their documentation as a result can get much more in-depth, just by virtue of having less to cover than Arch does.
But the entire point is how much better Arch's wiki is than anyone else's. I've never run Arch, I've only ever used Arch's wiki to help with Debian. Doing this ironically helps you keep in mind every weird Debianism to figure out how to apply what you're reading.
samgranieri 2 hours ago [-]
I"m still absolutely floored with how good the archwiki is. I can't hype it up enough. I really did't know what I was doing with systemd until I read that wonderful article, and also, the link to why the arch maintainer switched that distro to systemd made my accept the change to it.
bo1024 2 hours ago [-]
When I was starting with Linux (15 years ago) with Fedora, Ubuntu, etc., for all of my questions I kept finding answers on the Arch wiki. So eventually I just switched to Arch, so the answers would always work.
That was an era when searching the Internet worked. Come to think of it, I haven't had Arch wiki pop up in my search results in years.
frantathefranta 1 hours ago [-]
Both Kagi and DuckDuckGo have search bangs (!aw) to search ArchWiki articles. I also have ArchWiki boosted in my Kagi settings.
fernandotakai 9 minutes ago [-]
almost the same reason i started using arch: i wanted to install linux into my macbook, and the only wiki with enough info to make it work was arch's.
The Wiki is the stronghold of Arch. As are the the packages. A lot of stuff makes good things good is a lot manual labor by all involved people.
PS: Removing stuff or not accepting changes is also a significant part of the Wiki. It hurts, as usual. But necessary for readability.
krunck 11 minutes ago [-]
It's great to see such inter-project information sharing and cooperation!
blueflow 4 hours ago [-]
Look at the "ArchWiki active users per month" graph. What happened in 2013? With the exception of the lockdown period, it has been decreasing since then.
Macha 4 hours ago [-]
A spike in pages needing updates for the systemd migration which started in 2012 returned to a more normal level.
In recent years, NixOS has probably taken some of their enthusiast base too
polivier 2 hours ago [-]
I switched from Arch to NixOS and I know many others who did too. For users inclined to use a distro such as Arch, NixOS feels like the natural next step.
mapotofu 1 hours ago [-]
I’ve had to do very, very little to my Artix desktop since setting it up that I don’t think I’ll ever switch unless my life constraints changed significantly. NixOS seems like a lot to learn. I’m happy to be proven otherwise and know I’m not alone in becoming very complacent to my setup once getting to Arch.
xdfgh1112 4 hours ago [-]
Many people used Arch for its status as "the pro Linux distribution" i.e. not beginner friendly, but secretly still easy enough that you don't need much effort. That's how "I use Arch btw" became a meme.
These people have now moved to NixOS.
zozbot234 6 minutes ago [-]
> "the pro Linux distribution" i.e. not beginner friendly, but secretly still easy enough that you don't need much effort.
That's a common perception of Debian, perhaps even more than Arch. One difference being that Debian actually has a lot of notable use in production. It's also just as stable as any "LTS" distro, which is a welcome convenience for many beginners as well as more experienced users.
Foxboron 2 hours ago [-]
> That's how "I use Arch btw" became a meme.
Not really.
The meme is from 4chan and the /g/ board that had some origins around 2011/2012. Gentoo was the main meme before this.
After 2012'ish the meme-culture from 4chan became mainstream internet culture with the popularity of reddit. Nothing has really progressed beyond that.
> These people have now moved to NixOS.
[citation needed]
Imustaskforhelp 4 hours ago [-]
I mean, I was using nobara and my brother had showed me arch once and it looked so cool and he used to say, " that I have ran arch" and so I was watching a lot more arch content / linux too so I decided to try it to be "good at linux"
Not many regrets aside from the times that I accidentally deleted my hard drives so many times that I can't count on fingers lol, its still a little fun lol. Ricing it with hyprland and I am truly happy with my system.
I also have nix but I couldn't really love it aside from the fact that nix-env is really really cool.
aeonik 4 hours ago [-]
2013 is around the time Manjaro got popular.
Arch also locked down their forum posts due to popularity in 2011.
> Where is it appropriate to post a subscriber link?
> Almost anywhere. Private mail, messages to project mailing lists, and blog entries are all appropriate. As long as people do not use subscriber links as a way to defeat our attempts to gain subscribers, we are happy to see them shared.
corbet 44 minutes ago [-]
The occasional sharing of subscriber links in this way only does us good. If you enjoy the content, please subscribe and help ensure that there will be more of it!
stingraycharles 3 hours ago [-]
It’s a feature. I actually ended up subscribing to LWN precisely because of the quality of these types of articles.
OJFord 3 hours ago [-]
They're usually shared links (note the 'share a free link' button at the bottom, above comments) ime - I've never seen it styled like this before. Weird that it's a subscriber-only link that doesn't require login, but does for other subscriber-only actions like sharing a free link or replying to a comment.
pessimizer 39 minutes ago [-]
Joining lwn makes you a gatekeeper for lwn (and allows you to browse and comment on lwn), it doesn't simply allow you to be a reader of lwn. I'm sure their traffic has almost no relationship to their number of subscribers. Subscribers are just the people actively marketing the journalism. It's like a two-level pyramid scheme - you're spreading their journalism and looking smart, and 1/500 of the people you send it to become new subscribers.
ThePowerOfFuet 2 hours ago [-]
>The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber.
It's literally a feature.
smjburton 1 hours ago [-]
This is really exciting. I've used the Arch Wiki countless times for setting up or configuring something in Debian but wanting a resource more native to the platform. I hope they're able to produce a comparable wiki for Debian-based OSes.
nylonstrung 4 hours ago [-]
Hopefully they share it with NixOS next
dundarious 56 minutes ago [-]
Nix in general has some of the worst documentation I've ever encountered.
IsTom 2 hours ago [-]
> We are still quite a small wiki compared to Wikipedia
A small intermediate goal for ArchWiki
LadyCailin 4 hours ago [-]
Documentation is super important for complex things. I feel like it’s highly underrated by many otherwise great open source projects, to the severe detriment of the project. Nice to see an explicit focus on it.
gary_0 4 hours ago [-]
Underrated in proprietary and non-software tech, too. It's horrible when infrequent tasks turn into bespoke shitshows every time they crop up because nobody wrote down how to solve the problem. Having to figure things out from scratch every time is ridiculously inefficient. Even worse if it leads to customers having slightly different copies of the same kind of software or device configuration because there's no documented process to follow. I know from experience.
reedlaw 46 minutes ago [-]
I switched from Ubuntu to Arch because of the quality of the Arch wiki. Ubuntu search results were filled with so much misinformation that I realized it was a culture problem. Arch, with its higher barrier to entry, attracts users who maintain its standards.
I haven't even used Arch on any of my machines but can't count how many times I've found their wiki useful for my workstations, servers and even custom Yocto-built systems. Arch supports many ways of doing a thing, so whatever tool I'm dealing with, Arch probably supports that and documents it on the wiki. And Arch makes few changes from upstream so the wiki instructions are often applicable on any distro. Sure, it takes some familiarity to recognize when something is e.g. Debian-specific and should be done in a Debian way, but as a user fairly familiar with Linux, I often find Arch to be the best source of documentation.
BSD ties the kernel and the software on top of it together pretty heavily, creating the expectation that the documentation should cover all of it.
Linux is meanwhile kernel and software kept separated, meaning that the documentation usually winds up assembled from separate tools, each with their own standards.
Young and niche wikis are happy to take any contributions they can get. The quality and timeliness of any given bit of text soon ends up wildly different from page to page or even section to section. Some people may decide to take their time not just contributing new content but also editing existing content. However, it becomes difficult to balance creation vs. curation. Too much creation, and the editors get overwhelmed, and then the users can never be sure what to trust, and so the wiki becomes irrelevant. Too much curation, and the information becomes uniformly stale and lowest-common-denominator, so the users start going elsewhere, and so the wiki becomes irrelevant.
Different wikis means each one can have its own people and policies. If the people who made one wiki great leave, there are still other wikis out there. If the policies choke the life out of one wiki, there are still other wikis out there. Some wiki can be full of deletionists while another wiki is full of inclusionists. Some wiki can be full of mergers while another wiki is full of splitters.
Forcing everybody onto one wiki forces them all to work together, but this is an entirely volunteer effort, and so many will just leave. Even if they were paid, some individuals would dominate while others would get crowded out. One can point to Wikipedia as a glaring exception, standing as basically the only wiki of note of its kind, but I think it's the exception that proves the rule.
>why not try to turn it into a shared project?
This is basically both the highlight and the bane of the Linux world.
Why have another DE when there are already multiple ones? [0]
Why have another package manager when there are already multiple ones? [1]
Why have another distro when there are already multiple ones? [2]
So having another wiki makes perfect sense (or not depending on your POV)
0, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_Window_System_...
1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_package_manag...
2, https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
Also, the whole sharing somehow seems to have died off over the decades. 25+ years ago, when wiki was new and shiny and everyone was experimental and motivated, there were strong movements for interwiki-content, sharing stuff between them openly. Then time happened, not much sharing was done, and every wiki-software slowly moved on, doing their own thing, becoming some semi-open silo or even a closed garden.
And today we had this same movement arising in the knowledge management-community, around their tools, and mainly in the context of Markdown, and it also kinda died down and never turned into anything substantial. Maybe, in the end, sharing information and knowledge is a bit harder to execute than it seems?
All of these are possible to answer, but they are also much easier to deal with when you're not sharing between different organizations.
The hard part about sharing is the different syntax of wikis, which could be slightly different even in the same wiki-software. Then there is the organization-part, and the sync-process itself.
Of course, today, 25 years later, we do have better solutions and much more experience for those problems.
> The maintaining is hard when there isn't clear ownership. How do the teams divide maintenance duties? How are vandalism and moderation dealt with across teams?
I would think those are pretty simply, as they all follow the same rules. I mean, handling vandalism isn't much different between Arch or Debian, it's always the same. And moderation really depends on the chosen sharing-mechanism. Which brings up again the hard part, just on a different level.
Or ... instead of admitting something, we can also just find a scapegoat instead. Let's say bad coorporations somehow prevented it?
On the other hand, sharing information is easy. The hard part is in trusting that information in the time and age of spam, propaganda and advertisers. And companies are quite secretive and don't want to share too much by default for other reasons.
Also it is way easier just do something to your own wiki, than coordinate with dozens of others where you share something.
I have many vague and some concrete ideas since a while about building trust right into the wiki system somehow, but never got around to actually implement something. Because ah well, I have to admit. It really ain't trivial after all, solving human trust.
How?
> On the other hand, sharing information is easy.
Not in the way we are talking about.
> The hard part is in trusting that information in the time and age of spam
No, it's not. We're talking here about moderated Knowledge bases. Of course, if it's a poor or even unmoderated wiki, this would be a problem. But I've never got the impression that Arch-wiki had this problem.
> don't want to share too much by default for other reasons.
Sharing what? This is about open source? Is this AI-slope? O_o
> Also it is way easier just do something to your own wiki, than coordinate with dozens of others where you share something.
I don't think Arch-Wiki has only one maintainer.
About sharing information in general.
Wikis work in a open way, if they are niche, to not attract trolls or spam too much, otherwise they work by restricting guest rights, banning ip, etc. Usually pragmatically.
"No, it's not. We're talking here about moderated Knowledge bases. Of course, if it's a poor or even unmoderated wiki, this would be a problem. But I've never got the impression that Arch-wiki had this problem."
And arch wiki (and wikipedia itself) is a outlier, not the average wiki, that usually is outdated or plain wrong with no one caring.
Wikis do tend to link a lot across one another. On the Alpine Wiki, I prefer to link to the ArchWiki when applicable, rather than copy content over.
I know, FOSS is all about choice, yada yada.
Well, enjoy your optimized memory consumption instead.
What you're proposing is actually making the Linux kernel and userland closed source and controlled by a company like Microsoft.
There is simply no other way to get "one distro"
I know, people have difference preferences, yada yada.
It wouldn't produce a FOSS OS, as they are not FOSS.
Try more.
Nobody wants Linux to be more like windows, and otherwise they’d just use windows.
I do, and this is why FOSS cannot reach its political goals - it won't ensure user's freedom, for almost everyone involved today would rather chase their own satisfaction.
Fragmentation, though ugly and inconvenient, works as a defense. systemd, along with all of the other goofy all-encompassing subsystems that were inflicted on Linux over one hot decade from Red Hat, was obviously a ploy to do the above. The jury is still out as to whether it will be successful.
Arch is essentially completely freeform; you, the user, are going to be making a lot of technical decisions on what you want your system to look like. It's perfectly okay for Arch to ship 4 different versions of the same type of tool, as long as all 4 are being used. The Arch wiki reflects this; it's focused around giving you a lot of options, while not going too in-depth on what you'd want to do with them. Want to swap out NetworkManager for wpa_supplicant because wpa_supplicant is easier to configure from a terminal? Perfectly fine, go ahead. Most arch packages as a result don't heavily deviate from upstream unless it's absolutely necessary to get them running.
Debian uh... isn't that. Debian still offers choice, but Debian has set the unenviable goal for themselves to provide a "stable" userland experience. This means Debian offers less options, but the options they do offer are also fixed on certain versions with sometimes pretty derivative versions compares to upstream. Their documentation as a result can get much more in-depth, just by virtue of having less to cover than Arch does.
A basic example here is setting up a webserver stack (so webserver, php and mysql); on Debian, you pick between apache2(+mod_php) or nginx/php-fpm and install mysql. Debian takes care of wiring all the permissions, user groups and all that stuff and giving you a "sane" default folder capable of serving PHP scripts on port 80 that anyone can use. It's a lot easier and nginx' configuration is specifically changed to resemble the apache2 vhosts. Arch doesn't do this; arch gives you the upstream versions of all these packages and then asks you to wire them together so that they work.
It means they attract pretty different audiences as a result; Debian users value stability/set and forget (also helped by Debian release cycles basically lasting the same length as most LTS releases of other distros), while Arch users are more conditioned to having to occasionally change their config files on updates.
That's also reflected in what their wikis aim at. Debian wikis generally can be version locked to their release; Arch wiki needs constant updating as things change.
They're different extremes here; most distros usually sit on one side or the other of this sorta thing (with the only real correlation being that dpkg-based distros usually lean more towards the Debian model), but there's also the pseudo-rolling release distros like Fedora, which try to offer similar stability to Debian but much shorter release cycles, so you'll always be running something at least close to the latest version.
But the entire point is how much better Arch's wiki is than anyone else's. I've never run Arch, I've only ever used Arch's wiki to help with Debian. Doing this ironically helps you keep in mind every weird Debianism to figure out how to apply what you're reading.
That was an era when searching the Internet worked. Come to think of it, I haven't had Arch wiki pop up in my search results in years.
The Wiki is the stronghold of Arch. As are the the packages. A lot of stuff makes good things good is a lot manual labor by all involved people.
PS: Removing stuff or not accepting changes is also a significant part of the Wiki. It hurts, as usual. But necessary for readability.
In recent years, NixOS has probably taken some of their enthusiast base too
These people have now moved to NixOS.
That's a common perception of Debian, perhaps even more than Arch. One difference being that Debian actually has a lot of notable use in production. It's also just as stable as any "LTS" distro, which is a welcome convenience for many beginners as well as more experienced users.
Not really.
The meme is from 4chan and the /g/ board that had some origins around 2011/2012. Gentoo was the main meme before this.
After 2012'ish the meme-culture from 4chan became mainstream internet culture with the popularity of reddit. Nothing has really progressed beyond that.
> These people have now moved to NixOS.
[citation needed]
Not many regrets aside from the times that I accidentally deleted my hard drives so many times that I can't count on fingers lol, its still a little fun lol. Ricing it with hyprland and I am truly happy with my system.
I also have nix but I couldn't really love it aside from the fact that nix-env is really really cool.
Arch also locked down their forum posts due to popularity in 2011.
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=113819
> Where is it appropriate to post a subscriber link?
> Almost anywhere. Private mail, messages to project mailing lists, and blog entries are all appropriate. As long as people do not use subscriber links as a way to defeat our attempts to gain subscribers, we are happy to see them shared.
It's literally a feature.
A small intermediate goal for ArchWiki