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 Debian does have a lot of rambling, aspirationally-unfinished, outdated, and duplicated wiki pages.
Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian
111–120 of 131 posts
Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I'm glad ripgrep exists and also glad grep itself doesn't try to parse .gitingore
Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 documentatio…
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.
Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian
#115Instead 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 don't know if i agree. Good documentation is focused. If you try to cover everything it becomes dilluted and confusing.
Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian
#116Earlier 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.
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 woul…
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.
Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian
#117Make a wiki with Markdown syntax and GIT backend.
I wonder how well git scales as a backend. Access patterns of wikis seem kind of different than software.
Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 politi…
> I am not proposing anything. I am saying we would all be better if FOSS contributors focused and consolidated their effort.
Sure, and then maybe after that we can also solve world hunger and then all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
What you want is worthless, actually, if you don't have a plan on how to get there. We all want more polished software, less CO2 in the air, and more butter on movie theater popcorn.
If you want people to not fork, then you're either going to have to invent mind control or force people not to fork.
Well option 1 hasn't been invented yet. And option 2 is called closed source software.
Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian
#119Earlier 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. Nobody wants Linux to be more like windows, and otherwise they’d just use windows.
> 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 won't ensure user's freedom, for almost everyone involved today would rather chase their own satisfaction.
Why should my freedom to build my own distro that I choose to distribute for my reasons be squashed so some hypothetical "user" who might come along and have spoon-fed documentation?
Furthermore, the skillsets of writing good documentation and technical problem solving needed to build and roll out a distro are not 1-to-1.
Re: Arch shares its wiki strategy with Debian
#120The 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.
I'd argue that Arch has an advantage with its KISS philosophy. For example, because manual intervention is acceptable, it keeps the distro simpler for not having to handle odd edge cases with package breakages/upgrades