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Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

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Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#71

Post by layer8 »

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…

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.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#72

Post by guywithahat »

packetlost wrote: post #62
_ea1k wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When did this happen? I haven't seen anything about it online

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#73

Post by wolvesechoes »

const_cast wrote: post #64
wolvesechoes wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

> 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.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#75

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

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.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#77

Post by webstrand »

guywithahat wrote: post #72
packetlost wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When did this happen? I haven't seen anything about it online

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.gentoo...>

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.gentoo-...>

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#79

Post by wolvesechoes »

tremon wrote: post #61
wolvesechoes wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian

#80

Post by wolvesechoes »

pessimizer wrote: post #52
wolvesechoes wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 w…

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.
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