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Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

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Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#61

Post by tremon »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #33
tremon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" itsel…

And I thought that free software is about human freedom. Well, enjoy your optimized memory consumption instead.

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?

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#62

Post by packetlost »

_ea1k wrote: post #45
ACS_Solver wrote: post #17

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…

This sounds exactly like what we used to say about Gentoo back in its early days.

This was still the case of Gentoo until they wiped/lost their wiki and didn't have proper backups.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#63

Post by [deleted] »

_mlbt wrote: post #30
ACS_Solver wrote: post #17

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…

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 documentati…

[deleted]

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#64

Post by const_cast »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #33
tremon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" itsel…

And I thought that free software is about human freedom. Well, enjoy your optimized memory consumption instead.

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"

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#66

Post by fernandotakai »

samgranieri wrote: post #24

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.

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.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#67

Post by kelipso »

homebrewer wrote: post #7

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 proj…

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.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#68

Post by bongodongobob »

_mlbt wrote: post #30
ACS_Solver wrote: post #17

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…

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 documentati…

Linux != software that runs on Linux. Those are two completely different things.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#69

Post by zozbot234 »

xdfgh1112 wrote: post #9
blueflow wrote: post #2

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.

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.

> "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.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#70

Post by wolvesechoes »

pessimizer wrote: post #54
wolvesechoes wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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?

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