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Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

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Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#4

Interesting to see the documentation emphasized here. I don't use Arch, but I often see the arch wiki in google results for linux stuff I look up. Makes me wonder why wikis aren't used more for documentation.

Other distros have wikis but tend to focus more on documentation the distro specific details. Since Arch packages have very minimal modifications from upstream, this means much of the content from the ArchWiki is applicable across distros. But then once you have one wiki covering the generic advice, there's less motivation for others to duplicate that effort anyway.

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#5

Interesting to see the documentation emphasized here. I don't use Arch, but I often see the arch wiki in google results for linux stuff I look up. Makes me wonder why wikis aren't used more for documentation.

Wikis take a lot of maintenance by a determined core of contributors, or else the pages deteriorate into a pile of incoherent edits. Occasionally I see this even on the Arch wiki. Main text says “do this.” That’s followed by some text saying “I tried this and it didn’t work.” That’s followed by a text box saying “that method is deprecated.”

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#7
What I really like about Arch is how minimal & fast it can be without resorting to 'exotic' software or libraries.

I recently installed Archlinux32 on an old Pentium II machine just for the fun of it and was pleasantly surprised that it still feels reasonably responsive (I didn't get X11 to work yet though as the GPU driver for that machine apparently never reached mainline or was removed in the meantime).

Everything is managed by systemd/networkd the way it's authors intended. No custom scripts or other cruft or bloat. No 'helpful' background services to update man pages or the package database.

It's also refreshing how fast pacman is compared to apt.

Re: Arch Linux turns 20: Small, simple, great documentation

#8

What I really like about Arch is how minimal & fast it can be without resorting to 'exotic' software or libraries. I recently installed Archlinux32 on an old Pentium II machine just for the fun of it and was pleasantly surprised that it still feels reasonably responsive (I didn't get X11 to work yet though as the GPU driver for that machine apparently never reached mainline or was removed in the meantime). Everything…

Arch is not minimal. Debian netinstall does the same.

Alpine is. If you think Arch is fast, try Alpine x86.

On X.Org, VESA works everywhere.

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