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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

#61
post #31

gentoo forums & wiki initially were the goto place until it was deleted.

I used Gentoo back in the day and the wiki was good, I even contributed to it at times. Eventually I switched distro (didn't want to spend all my time compiling), and a few years later I went to look at the wiki and it had become much worse.

Do you know what the story was there, what happened? Why was it deleted?

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 if we are going towards some sort of centralization / decentralization cycles.

I also have some hope that LLMs will annihilate the commercial web of "generic" content and that may bring back the old web where the point was the human behind the content (be it a web page or a discussion). But that what I’d like, not a forecast.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Other good examples: Linuxthreads to NTPL (for providing pthreads), XFree86 to Xorg. I was using Gentoo at the time, which meant recompiling the world (in the first case) or everything GUI (in the second case). With a strict order of operations to not brick your system. Back then, before Arch existed (or at least before it was well known), the Gentoo wiki was known to be a really good resource. At some point it langu…

Arch was young in those days but I think fairly well known? we were quite vocal, opinionated and interjecting our views everywhere by the time of the Xfree86/Xorg switch. Perhaps it is just my view from being a part of it but I remember encountering the Arch reputation everywhere I went. Or maybe it is just the nostalgia influencing me.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other good examples: Linuxthreads to NTPL (for providing pthreads), XFree86 to Xorg. I was using Gentoo at the time, which meant recompiling the world (in the first case) or everything GUI (in the second case). With a strict order of operations to not brick your system. Back then, before Arch existed (or at least before it was well known), the Gentoo wiki was known to be a really good resource. At some point it langu…

Arch was young in those days but I think fairly well known? we were quite vocal, opinionated and interjecting our views everywhere by the time of the Xfree86/Xorg switch. Perhaps it is just my view from being a part of it but I remember encountering the Arch reputation everywhere I went. Or maybe it is just the nostalgia influencing me.

Could be. I don't remember Arch being on my radar at that point though. But it wasn't long after I switched from Gentoo to Arch (and then Debian for a decade due to lack of stability before going back to Arch 7 years ago or so).

A few years before the Xorg thing there was also the 2.4 to 2.6 kernel switchover. I think I maybe was using Slackware at that point, and I remember building my own kernel to try out the new shiny thing. You also had to update some userspace packages if I remember correctly: things like modprobe/insmod at the very least.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not OP, but used Arch for a while in 2011, and at some point doing an update moved /bin to /usr/bin or something like that and gave me an unbootable system. This was massive inconvenience and it took me many hours to un-hose that system, and I switched to Ubuntu. The Ubuntu became terrible with snaps and other user hostile software, so I switched to PopOS, then I got frustrated with out of date software and Cosmic be…

The silly move from /bin to /usr/bin broke lots of distros. Probably would have worked out if they'd had cp --reflink=auto --update to help ease migrations from files in /bin to /usr/bin and then just symlinked /bin to /usr/bin . However then any setups where /usr is a distinct filesystem from / would hard-require initramfs to set that up before handoff.

The python (is python2) transition was even more silly though. Breaking changes to the API and they wanted (and did!) force re-pointing the command to python3? That's still actively breaking stuff today in places that are forsaken enough to have to support python2 legacy systems.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#66

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 learned linux on debian first. The xserver (x11 or what as its old name) was not working so I had to use the commandline. I had a short debian handbook and worked through it slowly. Before that I had SUSE and a SUSE handbook with a GUI, which was totally useless. I then went on to use knoppix, kanotix, sidux, GoboLinux, eventually ended up with slackware. These days I tend to use manjaro, despite the drawback that…

Slackware only does long term stable releases but Slackware current is a rolling release that does not really feel like a rolling release because of how Slackware provides a full and complete system as the base system. I avoided Slackware current for years because I did not want to deal with the hassle of rolling release, but it is almost identical in experience to using the release.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#67
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unfortunately there's a trend lately where many newer cli tools don't have a man page. they put up a --help and think it suffices even though there are tools to automatically generate man pages those days

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.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arch was young in those days but I think fairly well known? we were quite vocal, opinionated and interjecting our views everywhere by the time of the Xfree86/Xorg switch. Perhaps it is just my view from being a part of it but I remember encountering the Arch reputation everywhere I went. Or maybe it is just the nostalgia influencing me.

Could be. I don't remember Arch being on my radar at that point though. But it wasn't long after I switched from Gentoo to Arch (and then Debian for a decade due to lack of stability before going back to Arch 7 years ago or so). A few years before the Xorg thing there was also the 2.4 to 2.6 kernel switchover. I think I maybe was using Slackware at that point, and I remember building my own kernel to try out the new…

2.6 was also the switch from OSS to Alsa, which caused some fun, Alsa really was not ready for prime time.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Other good examples: Linuxthreads to NTPL (for providing pthreads), XFree86 to Xorg. I was using Gentoo at the time, which meant recompiling the world (in the first case) or everything GUI (in the second case). With a strict order of operations to not brick your system. Back then, before Arch existed (or at least before it was well known), the Gentoo wiki was known to be a really good resource. At some point it langu…

I'm on Gentoo without the precompiled packages, except for very large applications. Gentoo wiki is not a match for Arch wiki for its sheer content and organization. But Gentoo wiki contains some stuff that Arch wiki doesn't. For example, what kernel features are needed for a certain application and functionality, and how a setup differs between systemd and other inits. I find both wikis quite informative in combination.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#70

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…

> 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 still the case when I switched to arch in like 2016 lol

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