[HN Gopher] Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian
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Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian
Author : lemper
Score : 338 points
Date : 2025-08-14 08:58 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lwn.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (lwn.net)
| blueflow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| homebrewer wrote:
| The baseline has been covered and there's not as much to write
| about anymore?
| aeonik wrote:
| 2013 is around the time Manjaro got popular.
|
| Arch also locked down their forum posts due to popularity in
| 2011.
|
| https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=113819
| xdfgh1112 wrote:
| 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.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| 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.
| Foxboron wrote:
| > 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]
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > "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.
| LadyCailin wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| homebrewer wrote:
| 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?
| noirscape wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| slightwinder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| "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.
| haunter wrote:
| >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)
|
| 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
| account42 wrote:
| Bane? It's what makes the Linux desktop great. I get to
| choose a system that works like I want.
|
| Imagine if there was only Gnome or whatever unholy
| monstrosity is the most popular DE these days.
| BirAdam wrote:
| If there were only one, someone would launch a new one
| within a week. Just how Linux is.
| zahlman wrote:
| >Why make a green bikeshed when there's already a red
| bikeshed?
|
| Because then you have two bikesheds. An important aspect of
| the fact that the bikeshed exists, as a separate entity not
| integrated with the house, is that you can choose a different
| one. Specifically, the one that's already painted the way you
| want.
|
| Maybe you don't think this is a feature in your current
| circumstance. Others do, which is why it persists.
| kzrdude wrote:
| 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.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| And I thought that _free software_ is about human freedom.
|
| Well, enjoy your optimized memory consumption instead.
| tremon wrote:
| 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?
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| See my reply to sibling comment.
|
| What is customization, if all you can customize are
| countless half-baked distros for tinkerers, teared
| through constant drama, ambitions of snowflake devs
| trying to make 100 competing solutions obsolete by
| introducing 101st, and forking, and, as a typical non-dev
| computer user, you are more and more dependent on
| adversary Big Techs?
|
| If Cyberpunk dystopia ever comes, I am sure we still will
| be able to choose between GNOME and KDE, and there will
| be people saying that we are still good, for we have a
| choice.
| const_cast wrote:
| 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"
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| > Human freedom includes the freedom to fork.
|
| It also includes the freedom to choose any product from
| the shelf in any store. But let's have a thought
| experiment - does the society that allows completely free
| consumption of material goods, but punishes any criticism
| against the government, economical policy etc. has more
| freedom than society that have some prohibition on
| consumption, yet allows free speech and political action?
|
| There is more than one facet of freedom, and personally I
| care more about collective freedom of the people and it
| would be served better by having few, but more polished
| FOSS options when it comes down to technology.
|
| > What you're proposing is actually making the Linux
| kernel and userland closed source and controlled by a
| company like Microsoft.
|
| I am not proposing anything. I am saying we would all be
| better if FOSS contributors focused and consolidated
| their effort.
|
| > There is simply no other way to get "one distro"
|
| You are probably right, this is why I am pessimist.
| zahlman wrote:
| Except that a lot of FOSS ends up pulling in huge
| dependencies to use tiny parts of them, doesn't tree-shake
| (granted not all languages make this easy), vendors a
| specific version of something you already have that would
| work fine, etc.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| WD-42 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
|
| As for _ensuring_ - how it is, that in 2025 AD we have
| more FOSS projects than ever, yet your typical computer
| user has less freedom and privacy than, let 's say, in
| 2000 AD?
| cma wrote:
| I'm glad ripgrep exists and also glad grep itself doesn't
| try to parse .gitingore
| burntsushi wrote:
| Bad take. If you can only ever improve what's there,
| there is no opportunity to try something new. For grep
| specifically, you can't much about its defaults, which
| makes "innovating" on its user experience very difficult.
| lupusreal wrote:
| The "political goals" are pretty fringe, to most people
| that enjoy FOSS, the goal is to get something that works
| for themselves and if other people don't like it, that's
| fine. Most people aren't RMS style revolutionaries trying
| to convert the global population to FOSS users. I admire
| that man, but his goals aren't my goals.
|
| For that matter, if political victory were to be achieved
| in the way you've suggested, it would be utterly Pyrrhic.
| The only way to achieve a unified singular FOSS operating
| system that nobody forks or otherwise competes with would
| be to strip users of their freedoms to do so. So that's
| not a victory at all for the political side of FOSS.
|
| You might conclude then that FOSS victory is impossible.
| I think so too, and that's fine. It doesn't stop FOSS
| from being useful to me and many other people. Some
| people will never use it, and that's fine.
| delfinom wrote:
| >I admire that man,
|
| He's a pdf file, there's not much to admire.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| But I didn't stated at any point I would like to prevent
| people from forking or starting something from scratch. I
| only stated that if FOSS contributors would focus their
| efforts more, we all would be in a better place.
|
| That they won't, I agree, for, as this thread shows,
| libertarian and individualist ideas are stronger in this
| demographics. I also agree that FOSS is useful even in
| its current state, but being useful is not a goal of
| _free software_. Freedom is a political notion.
|
| And common people do not need to care that much about
| free software ideas to consider political goals of the
| movement to be fulfilled, the same way today's workers do
| not need to care about socialist theory to enjoy workers
| rights.
| jsight wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > We could combine Macos and Windows too!
|
| It wouldn't produce a FOSS OS, as they are not FOSS.
|
| Try more.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| wolvesechoes wrote:
| But I believe there is a degree of fragmentation. If the
| fragmentation would look like this that we have, for
| example, just Debian, Arch and Fedora, we would still have
| a choice and escape hatches, and I wouldn't complain, even
| if it would be less effective than single distro.
| account42 wrote:
| That would be horrible.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| > 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.
| kbolino wrote:
| 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.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Wikipedia is definitely the exception. It works because
| almost everyone on the Internet uses it.
| account42 wrote:
| And it's not without problems, not the least of with is
| that being the default Wiki attracts the kind of people
| would would love to control the definite source of
| information.
| kelipso wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| delfinom wrote:
| > it would be great to have a cross distribution wiki with
| separate sections for distribution-specific instructions where
| it makes sense.
|
| This doesn't work as well as you think.
|
| We did this in one large OSS project for documenting operations
| just for installs/setup/build/etc.
|
| The problem is:
|
| 1. The list of differences get large fast if you aren't within
| the same family of OS like Debian/Ubuntu/Mint
|
| 2. Information will get out of date for some distros over
| others. Unhelpful pricks start bitching and moaning and nobody
| wants to deal with it at that point.
|
| 3. Unhelpful pricks will also bitch and moan you delete the out
| of date sections
| bawolff wrote:
| I don't know if i agree. Good documentation is focused. If you
| try to cover everything it becomes dilluted and confusing.
| nylonstrung wrote:
| Hopefully they share it with NixOS next
| dundarious wrote:
| Nix in general has some of the worst documentation I've ever
| encountered.
| abhijeetpbodas wrote:
| For lwn.net articles, aren't these subscriber-only links meant to
| be used only by the subscriber? Is sharing them on HN sabotaging
| lwn?
| rmccue wrote:
| https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#slinks
|
| > 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| 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.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| It's a feature. I actually ended up subscribing to LWN
| precisely because of the quality of these types of articles.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| >The following subscription-only content has been made
| available to you by an LWN subscriber.
|
| It's literally a feature.
| corbet wrote:
| 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!
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| 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.
| dlachausse wrote:
| 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.
| bitwize wrote:
| 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.
| hungmung wrote:
| Came in here to say the same thing. NetBSD should get more
| love.
|
| Practically speaking ArchWiki has everything I'm likely to
| need as a poweruser, but it's not really all that
| comprehensive.
| noirscape wrote:
| 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.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Yep. There is no "Linux Operating System." There's the
| Linux Kernel, and that kernel is used in tons of different
| OSes. It's sounds like a small nitpick but its a huge deal
| and a common misconception for those outside of the Linux
| world anytime a topic of unifying something in the Linux
| world comes up.
|
| A shared or central wiki sounds nice, but could quickly end
| up too messy. Arch having its own makes sense, as in the
| case of Linux - the distro is the operating system. Arch is
| a different OS from Fedora, which is a different OS from
| Ubuntu, etc. Sure, there's a lot of overlap but they are
| each their own unique OS.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| Yes, BSD is a single coherent system but so are many Linux
| distros. It's just that we've come to accept bad
| documentation as the norm for Linux-based tools. In my
| experience there's several types of problems that are very
| common for Linux tools:
|
| * Extremely short documentation. Everyone has seen these, a
| tool where the man page exists but provides almost no
| actual information.
|
| * Unfriendly reference-type documentation. GNU programs are
| often guilty of this, coreutils certainly comes to mind. On
| the upside, it's usually comprehensive. But it's not good -
| it's a short description followed by a sequential list of
| every option, so the functionality is described in detail
| but there are no usage examples, no list of the most common
| options, or anything like that. Great reference, poor usage
| documentation.
|
| * Too much info about ancient systems or historical
| details. Yes, it's great that many of these utilities are
| portable and can run on different systems or work with
| files from different systems. The man pages for zip/unzip
| mention MS-DOS, Minix and Atari systems, while defining the
| zip format as "commonly found on MS-DOS systems". The man
| page for less explains that it's a program "similar to
| more(1)" - completely useless info now - and mentions that
| it has some support for hardcopy terminals, again
| information that's not important enough for the first
| paragraph in 2025.
|
| * Poor keywords in the description. There's the
| theoretically useful apropos command. My Xorg wouldn't
| start so I tried to remember how to start my wifi up.
| apropos 'wlan|wi-fi|wifi|wireless' doesn't mention nmcli,
| which I was thinking of, though it does at least provide
| the much more difficult iw command.
|
| * Technical project-specific jargon that makes it easy to
| find the solution - if you already know it, that is. For
| example, Xorg documentation generally doesn't use the word
| "resolution". It's not in the xrandr or Xserver man page,
| and in the xorg.conf page it's only a reference to virtual
| screens. Because X uses the term screen size. That's fine,
| understandable and even accurate but most people would
| first search for 'resolution'.
| eacnamn wrote:
| I for one really enjoy the historical anecdotes you get
| in the "NOTES", "PORTABILITY" or even "BUGS" sections.
| But I do realise that my context is mostly recreational,
| work doesn't really require glueing POSIX commands
| together.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Linux != software that runs on Linux. Those are two
| completely different things.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| I don't think anyone is confused about this. Linux is a
| shorthand for the family of Unix like operating systems
| that use Linux as the kernel. The only ambiguity in this
| shorthand is if android or chrome os are being referenced,
| but it's pretty clear from context that they are not
| relevant to the discussion.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Its consistent conventions also help a lot -- it means
| learning a handful of things once, which can then be applied
| numerous other places (which as an aside, used to also be a
| strength of macOS). No need to even consult the manpage in
| many cases then.
|
| An interesting but gargantuan project would be a Linux distro
| that maintains patches for all of its packages that
| standardize directory structures, config file locations, CLI
| argument order, etc.
| sbinnee wrote:
| I can't agree more
| jsight wrote:
| This sounds exactly like what we used to say about Gentoo back
| in its early days.
| packetlost wrote:
| This was still the case of Gentoo until they wiped/lost their
| wiki and didn't have proper backups.
| guywithahat wrote:
| When did this happen? I haven't seen anything about it
| online
| webstrand wrote:
| From what I can gather, the event happened in 2008. At
| the time gentoo had no official wiki, it was an
| unofficial wiki that died or went offline for a
| significant amount of time.
|
| <https://web.archive.org/web/20081023145740/http://www.ge
| ntoo...>
|
| And when it came back online in november,
|
| > Gentoo-Wiki recently had it's database lost; this is
| the rewrite of the site
|
| <https://web.archive.org/web/20081204053828/http://en.gen
| too-...>
| alxlaz wrote:
| Yeah, the Arch wiki is the Gentoo wiki we lost. I was around
| for it and the Gentoo wiki was _amazing_ , it was one of the
| best Linux resources all-around, it was tremendously useful
| even if you didn't use Gentoo.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I remember long before I started using Arch I would google
| something nuanced for Ubuntu and there it was on the Arch Linux
| wiki with a "for Ubuntu users do this" section to fix whatever
| my issue was, this happened multiple times.
| Dwedit wrote:
| The special instructions for other distros could be at risk
| for being deleted, as "something that will not work on Arch
| as-is is not something we will be hosting on our site".
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Feels like someone needs to make a generic Linux wiki then.
| Xss3 wrote:
| The arch wiki could expand to support distro switching,
| with each distro having its own domain, and all that
| could link back to a general linux wiki. It'd be
| beautiful.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| They already had it fine, now its out of their scope.
| m463 wrote:
| I think one reason the arch wiki thrives is that it _IS_
| a generic linux wiki.
|
| The arch wiki describes the upstream package.
|
| I say this because Arch tries to use the upstream
| software as-is, and describes requirements and helps make
| configuration choices.
|
| Other distributions tend to make the choices for you,
| configuring and modifying upstream to fit the
| distribution.
|
| With respect to a wiki, this would be another layer of
| documentation to add. Describe the package, describe the
| distro, and explain the configuration choices.
| samgranieri wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Both Kagi and DuckDuckGo have search bangs (!aw) to search
| ArchWiki articles. I also have ArchWiki boosted in my Kagi
| settings.
| tempfile wrote:
| Sounds worth reading. Is this the article you mean?
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd
| rdlw wrote:
| That's the systemd article, and this is the forum post
| explaining why arch moved to systemd:
| https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1149530#p1149530
| pkulak wrote:
| https://archive.is/Mi9DP
|
| Scroll down to the long post by tomegun.
|
| I kinda get the animosity now. I wasn't really using Linux
| at the time, but if I was, and my system was running great,
| and then I had a list of complicated instructions I had to
| perform to change my init system... I'd probably be peeved
| off.
| fernandotakai wrote:
| 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.
| ho_schi wrote:
| I shall edit more in the Wiki and post less here.
|
| 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.
| IsTom wrote:
| > We are still quite a small wiki compared to Wikipedia
|
| A small intermediate goal for ArchWiki
| smjburton wrote:
| 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.
| reedlaw wrote:
| 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.
| krunck wrote:
| It's great to see such inter-project information sharing and
| cooperation!
| zoobab wrote:
| Make a wiki with Markdown syntax and GIT backend.
| jxbsbdbd wrote:
| These are a dime a dozen. Jet non of them has any significant
| share in the pure wiki space
| aakkaakk wrote:
| Name a few of them.
| zahlman wrote:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=markdown+based+wiki
|
| People can't name them off the top of their heads, exactly
| because none of them have caught on. But they're easy to
| find.
| bawolff wrote:
| I wonder how well git scales as a backend. Access patterns of
| wikis seem kind of different than software.
| Gander5739 wrote:
| > MediaWiki markup is different. It is weird and fragile;
| changing a single token can completely break a page. It is also,
| he said, difficult to write a proper or robust parser for the
| language.
|
| Good thing mwparserfromhell exists, then.
| verdverm wrote:
| I went to install debian recently, but ended up with ubuntu
| because debian docs were so convoluted. Could not find the
| minimal iso I was looking for
|
| I hope debian sees improvement here with this announcement
| mauvehaus wrote:
| The Arch wiki is the PostgreSQL documentation of Linux. Even if
| you're not using Arch or Postgres, it's a great starting point
| for how something is supposed to work and it covers enough
| details that you can extrapolate a bit.
| Voultapher wrote:
| It's one the reasons I'm using Arch. Great features are worth
| little to me if I don't know about them. What I like particularly
| about the wiki is their why sections that explain why one would
| want to choose one way over another. A good example of this is
| the page on data-at-rest encryption [1].
|
| [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Data-at-rest_encryption
| w4rh4wk5 wrote:
| On the topic of Arch wiki, I know there are a couple of offline
| and cli / tui solutions. Which do you use and recommend?
| jbirer wrote:
| I found myself on Arch Wiki for so many non-Arch issues that I
| decided that I'll just install Arch and use it.
| 7bit wrote:
| The Arch Linux community is one of the most toxic I know. First
| and foremost, there are members with tens of thousands of posts
| who become condescending and insulting when other members don't
| dance to their tune. The Code of Conduct exists only on paper and
| is not enforced by the Arch leadership. This results in such
| behavior not only being tolerated but actively encouraged. Shame
| on them and shame on Debian for further encouraging this
| behaviour by inviting them to the DebConf.
| burnt-resistor wrote:
| This seems heavy on self-promotion. Meanwhile, Arch is still
| x86-centric (in spite of fragmented, unofficial forks) and
| doesn't do LTS, while Debian supports multiple architectures and
| stability. Debian does have a lot of rambling, aspirationally-
| unfinished, outdated, and duplicated wiki pages.
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