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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

#161

Post by red-iron-pine »

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!

man came here to say the same.

used gentoo for all of 5 minutes in 2005 but the wiki was amazing and I referenced it repeatedly for other things.

generally heard the same about the arch wiki, too

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#162

Post by JCattheATM »

skydhash wrote: post #150
JCattheATM wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was never a fan of openbsd, a lot of the security claims are misplaced, bordering on theater. glibc support isn't so bad in Alpine, there are compatibility packages that work for most things if there isn't a flatpak.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#163

Post by jorvi »

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.

Interestingly enough, the ArchWiki itself seems to slowly be getting augmented by NixOS its wiki. Due to the way NixOS works, new packages constantly hit weird edge cases, which then requires deep diving into the package to write a workaround, the info of which either ends up in the wiki or the .nix package comments.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#164

Post by itvision »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #81
itvision wrote: post #77

This wiki exemplifies how broken Linux (on desktop) is and it's weird Linux fans ignore this fact.

I'll bite. How does a wiki targeted at users of a specific GNU/Linux distribution, a distribution which has made the express decision to be orientated towards technical users and not provide user-friendly tools for its configuration, exemplify how "Linux" (i.e. any GNU/Linux distribution) is broken on desktop? (I use Arch btw)

This wiki is NOT Arch specific. A ton of advice and information is for all Linux distros and the Linux kernel itself, e.g.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#165

Post by alfiedotwtf »

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!

Glad ours not just me. Had been using Arch for years, and whenever I landed on their docs pages, the first thing I would think of EVERY time without fail was is Gentoo wiki!

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#166

Post by MarsIronPI »

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!

Yes, the Gentoo wiki used to be the top, but it was an unofficial wiki and so wasn't backed up properly. Then it suffered a data loss and never recovered. I believe there is still an archive of some of its pages on the Wayback Machine.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#167

Post by bdavbdav »

VorpalWay wrote: post #51
bdavbdav wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may be preferred, but in a lot of cases they’re pretty terrible. I had a bit of a heated debate with ChatGPT about the best way to restore a broken strange mdadm setup. It was very confidently wrong, and battled its point until I posted terminal output. Sometimes I feel it’s learnt from the more belligerent side of OSS maintenance!

Why would you bother arguing with an LLM? If you know the answer, just walk away and have a better day. It is not like it will learn from your interaction.

Because I wasn’t 100% sure of the solution myself, and wanted to talk through how to actually implement the theory of what I wanted to do. I knew that what it was suggesting was 100% wrong, but not of the best path.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#168

Post by bdavbdav »

dessimus wrote: post #128
VorpalWay wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you bother arguing with an LLM? If you know the answer, just walk away and have a better day. It is not like it will learn from your interaction.

The Gell-Mann effect? If you can't trust LLM to assist with troubleshooting in the domain one is very familiar (mdadm), then why trust it in another that one is less familiar such as zfs or k8s?

I think my position is that I don’t trust it at all carte Blanche, but if I know what I’m doing, then it’s helpful as a doc source. In this case, I wasn’t too familiar with the specific cli tools, flags etc and it was a shortcut.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#169

Post by bdavbdav »

DevDesmond wrote: post #152
bdavbdav wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They may be preferred, but in a lot of cases they’re pretty terrible. I had a bit of a heated debate with ChatGPT about the best way to restore a broken strange mdadm setup. It was very confidently wrong, and battled its point until I posted terminal output. Sometimes I feel it’s learnt from the more belligerent side of OSS maintenance!

Arguing with an LLM is silly because you’re dealing with two adversarial effects at once: - As the context window grows the LLM will become less intelligent [1] - Once your conversation takes a bad turn, you have effectively “poisoned” the context window, and are asking an algorithm to predict the likely continuation of text that is itself incorrect [2]. (It emulating the “belligerent side of OSS maintenance” is prob…

I knew roughly the right path, and wanted guidance on that (cli guidance specifically). It was refusing to do so saying it wouldn’t work! It did work…:

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#170

Post by agumonkey »

duesabati wrote: post #108
agumonkey wrote: post #86

I'm still somehow surprised at the implicit culture quality (concise, precise, extensive) of that wiki, because it seems there was no strictly enforced rules on how to create it. Similar-minded people recognized the quality and flocked to make it grow.

I can see that too, this might be a reason for its success, all the articles are very straightforward and full of paths you may encounter

And it matches the mindset of some linux users quite strongly. We regularly see people relying on it even though there were other well documented distros, ubuntu for instance, but it's not the same (too newcomer focused, or too administrative in spirit..). the only wiki that felt close, was the sadly gone gentoo wiki, sharp and full of gems.
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