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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

#141

Post by KAMSPioneer »

badgersnake wrote: post #101
assimpleaspossi wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly Only a Linux user would consider the instability of a Linux distro to be a good thing.

If your goal is to learn how it works this was great, a new challenge every day. Perhaps we need a chaosmonkey Linux distro. Also FreeBSD did this well recently, migrating libc and libsys in the wrong order so you have no kernel API. That was fun.

I was hit with that on a remote box in another country! Should have researched the upgrade more before I did it, but it is a personal thing and not work.

However, my IPMI motherboard and FreeBSD's integrated ZFS boot environments might be considered cheating...

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#142

Post by dingnuts »

arendtio wrote: post #136
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!

> Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo! Exactly my thought! 20 years ago, I used Gentoo, and their wiki was the best. Somewhen the Arch wiki appeared and became better and better. At some point, I was tired of compiling for hours and switched one machine at a time to Arch, and today, the Arch wiki is the number one.

Arch and its wikin were already pretty good when it happened, but the real turning point was when the Gentoo wiki got hacked. After that, it never really recovered, and the Arch wiki must have absorbed a lot of that expertise because that's when it really took off.

as I recall anyway. can't believe it's been so long.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#143

Post by bombcar »

jiehong wrote: post #67
wpm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should write a tool that converts help output to troff, even if the result wouldn't be as detailed and nice to read as a good man page it would save me the frustration of having to stab at "will i get usage docs with a -h, a --help, a -help, or running it with no args at all".

This reminds me of go cli being pretty anal about this: you type `go fmt —help`, and it recognises you want help, but instead of showing the help, it tells you to use the totally non-standard cli pattern of `go help fmt` instead.

Reminds me of the rage of doing `man gnutool` and getting something complaining about how GNU info was where to go.

c-x alt-meta-shift eat-flaming-death

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#144

Post by randomtoast »

shevy-java wrote: post #57

The ArchWiki is indeed pretty good. I used to prefer the gentoo wiki back in the days but I think the ArchWiki may be better at this point in time. It's also interesting to see that many other Linux distributions fail to have any wiki at all, yet alone one that has high quality content. This is especially frustrating because Google search got so worse now that finding resources is hard. I tried to explain this proble…

I think part of the ArchWiki’s strength is that it treats documentation as first-class infrastructure. There is a shared expectation that if you solve something nontrivial, you upstream it into the wiki in a reasonably neutral, upstream-oriented way. That creates compounding returns over time. It also helps that Arch has a relatively coherent user base with similar assumptions about init systems, packaging, and defaults.

Many other distributions fragment their knowledge across mailing lists, forum posts, bug trackers, and random blog entries. That worked when search engines were good at surfacing niche technical content. With current search quality, especially the SEO noise layer, the absence of a canonical, well-curated wiki becomes very visible.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#145

Post by gosub100 »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #96
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…

>>Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly Only a Linux user would consider the instability of a Linux distro to be a good thing.

If you choose not to upgrade, it is stable. There is no QA department for Linux (or windows, they were let go around 2015) so someone has to endure the instability if there is to be any progress. We should all thank those who run nascent software so those who run stable distros can have stability.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#146

Post by redox99 »

aeroevan wrote: post #113
redox99 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's a wiki. Maybe you lose the edit history and stuff like that, but the actual content which is what matters should be very easy to recreate from those sources.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#148

Post by estimator7292 »

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…

Arch linux will still happily blow itself up if you skip updates for too long.

It's to the point where if I see 'archlinix-keyring' in my system update, I immediately abort and run through the manual process of updating keys. That's prevented any arch nuclear disasters for the last couple years

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#149

Post by speed_spread »

rjzzleep wrote: post #95
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!

> Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo! It is, didn't Gentoo suffer some sort of data loss which made it lose its popularity?

Gentoo's source based approach was always destined to be less popular than a precompiled distro. Compile times & customization options select for a certain clientele.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#150

Post by skydhash »

JCattheATM wrote: post #111
ofalkaed wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sta…

I like alpine because it try to be relatively simple (openrc, busybox, …). My only issue is programs relying on glibc for no reason (altough you can use flatpack). But I’m using openbsd now.
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