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.
sbinnee · 14m ago
I can't agree more
dlachausse · 47m 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.
bitwize · 23m 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.
homebrewer · 2h 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?
haunter · 1h 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)
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 · 1h 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 · 44m 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.
lukan · 58m 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 · 38m 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 · 8m 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.
wolvesechoes · 1h 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 · 1h 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 · 33m ago
And I thought that free software is about human freedom.
Well, enjoy your optimized memory consumption instead.
bitwize · 18m 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 · 1h 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 · 2h 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.
samgranieri · 1h 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 · 21m 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.
> 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.
stingraycharles · 2h ago
It’s a feature. I actually ended up subscribing to LWN precisely because of the quality of these types of articles.
OJFord · 2h 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.
ThePowerOfFuet · 47m ago
>The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber.
It's literally a feature.
blueflow · 2h 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 · 2h 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 · 28m 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 · 16m 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 · 2h 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.
Foxboron · 1h 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 · 2h 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 · 2h ago
2013 is around the time Manjaro got popular.
Arch also locked down their forum posts due to popularity in 2011.
The baseline has been covered and there's not as much to write about anymore?
nylonstrung · 2h ago
Hopefully they share it with NixOS next
IsTom · 51m ago
> We are still quite a small wiki compared to Wikipedia
A small intermediate goal for ArchWiki
LadyCailin · 2h 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 · 2h 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.
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.
>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.
I know, FOSS is all about choice, yada yada.
Well, enjoy your optimized memory consumption instead.
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.
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.
> 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.
In recent years, NixOS has probably taken some of their enthusiast base too
These people have now moved to NixOS.
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
A small intermediate goal for ArchWiki