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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

#71

Post by VorpalWay »

ofalkaed wrote: post #68
VorpalWay wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh yeah, you just unlocked a forgotten memory. I was actually lucky there, I had a SoundBlaster Live 5.1 which worked just fine on ALSA (hardware mixing even worked out of the box). But I remember lots of other people complaining on IRC about it.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#72

Post by czernobog »

enoeht wrote: post #31

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

It was? Did they bring it back because I do see stuff on their forums..

I do prefer gentoo wiki over arch wiki from time to time as things feel less cluttered to me but that's just my opinion.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#73

Post by grundrausch3n »

pjerem wrote: post #62
integralid wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I kind of fear the same. At the same time I wonder if structured information will gain usefulness. Something like man pages are already a great resource for humans, but at same time could be used for autocompletion and for LLMs. Maybe not in the current format but in the same vein.

But longer form tutorials or even books with background might suffer more. I wonder how big the market of nice books on IT topics will be in the future. A wiki is probably in the worst place. It will not be changed with the MR like man pages could be and you do not get the same reward compared to publishing a book.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#74

Post by virgoerns »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #53
nextaccountic wrote: post #11

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

Because installing a man page requires root and a writeable root fs for that matter

It doesn't need root if you set MANPATH.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#75

Post by vladvasiliu »

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.

Maybe GP knew the proposed solution couldn't have worked, without knowing the actual solution?

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#76

Post by grundrausch3n »

shevy-java wrote: post #60
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 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…

I actually got a lot of Linux knowledge from the Suse handbooks, but when I was still buying a box in the book store because of slow internet connection in the beginning of the 2000. For Linux content nowadays the Arch wiki is still one of my most used resources although I did not use Arch in years.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#78

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

itvision wrote: post #77

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

It exemplifies how complicated a "combine software to make your own user space" system is.

I've been running Ubuntu this or that since 2007. Desktops, laptops, work computers, personal computers, servers. There has been some BS to deal with, but frankly with common hardware it's exactly the same as any other system. Desktop runtime with web browser support. Except that you can do whatever you want, if you choose.

The idea of Arch was that it's supposed to be hard mode, if that's even true anymore. Any non-tech person I've showed my computer is like "oo, what is that?" I say "it's a desktop environment, here's the web browser." And that's all there is to it.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#79

Post by goku12 »

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…

Arch wiki is indeed the most informative and comprehensive of all, so much so that users of any distro should find it useful too. Two other distro wikis with smaller, but useful content are Gentoo's and Debian's. Gentoo's speciality in my opinion, is that it contains some lower level information like the required kernel features, and difference between setups using systemd and other inits. Debian wiki contains some information that's related to standards, development, packaging and quality control. These make them useful, despite the availability of the Arch wiki.

Though not distro wikis, there's also a wealth of information on the Linux documentation site and the kernel newbies site. A lot of useful information is also present on Stack Overflow. I just wish that they hadn't shot themselves in the foot by alienating their contributors like this.

Other documentation sources like BSDs' are a bit more organized than that of Linux's, thanks to their strong emphasis on documentation. I wish Linux documentation was a more integrated single source, instead of being scattered around like this. It would have required more effort and discipline regarding documentation. Nevertheless, I guess that I should be grateful for these sources and the ability to leverage them. While I do rely on LLMs occasionally for solutions, I'm not very found of them because they're often very misguided, ill advised and lack the tiny bits of insight and wisdom that often accompany human generated documentation. It would be a disaster if the latter just faded into oblivion due to the over reliance on LLMs.

Re: I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

#80

Post by vladvasiliu »

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...

I think it all comes down to curiosity, and I dare think that that's one of the main reasons why someone will be using Arch instead of the plethora of other distros.

Now, granted, I don't usually ask an LLM for help whenever I have an issue, so I may be missing something, but to me, the workflow is "I have an issue. What do I do?", and you get an answer: "do this". Maybe if you just want stuff to work well enough out of the box while minimizing time doing research, you'll just pick something other than Arch in the first place and be on your merry way.

For me, typically, I just want to fix an annoyance rather than a showstopping problem. And, for that, the Arch Wiki has a tremendous value. I'll look up the subject, and then go read the related pages. This will more often than not open my eyes to different possibilities I hadn't thought about, sometimes even for unrelated things.

As an example, I was looking something up about my mouse the other day and ended up reading about thermal management on my new-to-me ThinkPad (never had one before).

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