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I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

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Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#111

Post by JCattheATM »

ofalkaed wrote: post #38
binsquare wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This brings back memories, same here! I even bookmarked a page to remember how to rebuild the kernel because I can always expect it breaking.

I didn't really get into custom kernels until I started using Crux. A few years after I started using Arch I got sick of the rolling release and Arch's constant breakages, so I started looking into the alternatives, that brought me to Crux (which Arch was based off of) and Slackware (which was philosophically the opposite of Arch without sacrificing the base understanding of the OS). Crux would have probably won out…

Arch always turned me off with it's rolling release schedule, and I wasn't that impressed with pacman to be honest. I used to love Slack, but they lost their way trying to compete with Ubuntu and the like. I remember thinking how ridiculous it was for mplayer to have samba as a dependency, and the community saying a full install was the intended way to run Slack. I ran it as a minimalist without issues until they started wanting to compete in the desktop space.

The best successor I've found is Alpine. It's minimal and secure by design, has an excellent package manager (I much prefer apk to pacman or xbps, or apt and rpm for that matter), has stable and LTS releases while letting people who want to be rolling release do so by running edge. People think it's only for containers but it has every desktop package anyone would need, all up to date and well maintained. Their wiki isn't at Arch's level, but it's pretty damn good in its own right.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#112

Post by etyhhgfff »

dietr1ch wrote: post #23
canadiantim wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you using now?

NixOS. Having a config-defined system is a bit too different at first, but really nice when it comes to system reproducibility, and being able to roll back. It made maintaining my laptop + workstations the "same" a breeze, although it took a bit to learn and settle into something that works for me. It seems today things are easier for newcomers, but Nix Flakes are still "experimental", and thus the documentation on t…

Nix Flakes are around for years and still experimental?

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#113

Post by aeroevan »

redox99 wrote: post #102
fodkodrasz wrote: post #87

I just hope they have robust backups and disaster-recovery plans, as Gentoo Wiki once had a terrible data loss, and it was like the burning of the Alexandria Library, I feel that put the distro to a decline. I don't use Arch (I used Gentoo in those times), but these collaborative knowledge bases are too precious to be lost. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44900319

Wouldn't everything be on the internet archive? And common crawl?

Being on the internet archive and being able to pick up from a restored backup are two very different things

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#114

Post by xattt »

reidrac wrote: post #85

Very useful because the information is almost distribution agnostic as Arch will stick to upstream as much as possible; or at least that's my impression as Debian user reading their wiki. Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo!

I get the sense the Arch wiki pages has more detail than the man pages themselves.

The wiki captures the knowledge that developers of said apps assume to be common, but don’t actually make sense unless you are bootstrapped into the paradigm.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#115

Post by leoedin »

miki123211 wrote: post #106
pjerem wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think we will, at some point, face a knowledge crisis because nobody will be willing to upload the new knowledge to the internet. Then the LLM companies will notice, and they’ll start to create their own updated private training data. But that may be a new centralization of knowledge which was already the case before the internet. I wonder if we are going to some sort of equilibrium between LLMs and the web or i…

I wouldn't be surprised if LLM companies end up sponsoring certain platforms / news sites, in exchange for being able to use their content of course. THe problem with LLMs is that a single token (or even a single book) isn't really worth that much. It's not like human writing, where we'll pay far more for "Harry Potter" and "The Art of Computer Programming" than some romance trash with three reads on Kindle.

This is perhaps true from the "language model" point of view, but surely from the "knowledge" point of view an LLM is prioritising a few "correct" data sources?

I wonder about this a lot when I ask LLMs niche technical questions. Often there is only one canonical source of truth. Surely it's somehow internally prioritising the official documentation? Or is it querying the documentation in the background and inserting it into the context window?

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#116

Post by ambicapter »

ofalkaed wrote: post #15

I learned linux by using Arch back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something unique to your install. This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet, I updated when I went to the library which was generally a weekly thing but sometimes it be a month or two and the system breaka…

I had somebody’s pgp key break something yesterday :) learned about arch-key ring.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#117

Post by ambicapter »

benoliver999 wrote: post #50
piekvorst wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have started using Arch in 2016 and it was stable back then. Are you describing an earlier era?

The switch to systemd is the last time I FUBARed my system. 2012 it looks like?? I simply did not even remotely understand what I was doing.

> I simply did not even remotely understand what I was doing

Why do I miss the stupid unconscious bravery of those days :)

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#118

Post by myself248 »

fodkodrasz wrote: post #87

I just hope they have robust backups and disaster-recovery plans, as Gentoo Wiki once had a terrible data loss, and it was like the burning of the Alexandria Library, I feel that put the distro to a decline. I don't use Arch (I used Gentoo in those times), but these collaborative knowledge bases are too precious to be lost. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44900319

I download the Kiwix copy of the Arch wiki every year or two, as my offline source of linux knowledge in case I find myself offline for some reason.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#119

Post by myself248 »

Cyph0n wrote: post #20

A thanks from me too! I do not use Arch, but still use the wiki as a primary reference to understand various tools. Two recent examples were CUPS and SANE: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CUPS https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SANE

I don't use Arch either, but both of those links show as visited in my browser!

What a concentration of knowledge. It's not always my first click for a given problem, but it's often my last.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#120

Post by mdnahas »

resonious wrote: post #37
keysersoze33 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've contributed 32 edits (1 new page) in the past 10 years, so despite being stable, there are still many things to add and fix! Sadly, the edit volume will likely drop as LLMs are now the preferred source for technical Linux info/everything...

At the same time, I suspect resources like the Arch Wiki are largely responsible for how good AI is at fixing this kind of stuff. So I'm hoping that somehow people realize this and can continue contributing good human-written content (in general).

I just installed Arch (EndeavourOS) and LLM did not help. The problems were new and the LLM’s answers were out-of-date. I wasted about 5 hours. Arch’s wiki and EndeavourOS’s forums were much better. YMMV
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