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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

#41

Post by thr0w4w4y1337 »

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

...a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#43

Post by integralid »

overfeed wrote: post #39
resonious wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> So I'm hoping that somehow people realize this and can continue contributing good human-written content (in general). AI walled-gardens break the feedback loop: authors seeing view-counts and seeing "[Solved] thank you!" messages helps morale.

Definitely, being unpaid LLM trainer for big corporations while nobody actually reads your work is not very encouraging. I wonder what the future will bring.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#44

Post by ofalkaed »

doubled112 wrote: post #35
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 becoming stable and not breaking regularly I believe this to be the entire ecosystem, not just Arch. It's been a long while since something like moving to 64bit happened. Or swapping out init systems.

Most distros were stable well before Arch because Arch worked out most of the bugs for them and documented them on their wiki. Arch and other bleeding edge distros are still a big part of the stability of linux even if they don't break all that often anymore, they find a lot of the edge cases before they are issue for the big distros. In 2005 it was not difficult to have a stable linux install, you may have had to hunt a bit for the right hardware and it may have taken awhile to get things working but once things were working they tended to be stable. I can only think of one time Slackware broke things for me since I started using it around 2005, it taking on PulseAudio caused me some headaches but I use Slackware for audio work and am not their target so this is to be expected. Crux was rock solid for me into the 10s, nearly a decade of use and not even a hiccup.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#45

Post by Groxx »

The Arch wiki has rapidly become my go-to source for every time I need a real answer... and honestly it should just become my default for everything Linux. It's astoundingly high quality, some of the best content out there whether or not you're using Arch.

So +1000, I love their work, and all the contributors! It's so, so good, and greatly appreciated.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#46

Post by bdavbdav »

keysersoze33 wrote: post #25
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'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...

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!

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#47

Post by razemio »

noufalibrahim wrote: post #27

I've never used Arch but I can really get the vibe here. Wikis (especially toopical ones) are social media of sorts. There was a strong community around the #emacs IRC channel and emacswiki.org back in the day. About a 100 people who knew each other quite well. And an Emacs bot that could read from the wiki (pre-modern RAG I suppose) and answer questions.

I think with arch wiki it is even more than that. Before I switched to arch back then, you would consult the arch wiki for an unrelated distro, because it was (is) that good. Even the aur repository helps you alot, by checking the raw scripts, how to compile stuff. I can't make a good example but it feeled like reading vi specific wiki that helped you with plugin development for emacs.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#48

Post by bdavbdav »

overfeed wrote: post #39
resonious wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> So I'm hoping that somehow people realize this and can continue contributing good human-written content (in general). AI walled-gardens break the feedback loop: authors seeing view-counts and seeing "[Solved] thank you!" messages helps morale.

Absolutely. Even though I don’t use arch (btw), the wiki is still a fantastic configuration reference for many packages: systemd, acpi, sensors, networkmanager I’ve used it for fairly recently.

You see it referenced everywhere as a fantastic documentation source. I’d love seeing that if I were a contributor

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#49

Post by ErenayDev »

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…

About a year ago, when I installed Arch, my first Linux distro, most things were great. However, while testing some commands in pacman, there were a bunch of Python-related packages (even though I hadn't downloaded them). Since I needed some disk space, I figured deleting them wouldn't hurt. Unfortunately, I couldn't boot again. I guess the ones related to Python were related to Hyprland and Quickshell.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#50

Post by benoliver999 »

piekvorst wrote: post #21
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 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.
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