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!
Gentoo's wiki is still great (& Arch's has been great for a long time), but yes, Arch's is probably improving at a faster rate. Arch is also a little more comprehensive when it comes to mainstream tech that's divergent like init & network management - Gentoo's still good here but openrc & netifrc show their influence throughout.
I get the sense the Arch wiki pages has more detail than the man pages themselves.
The wiki captures the knowledge that developers of said apps assume to be common, but don’t actually make sense unless you are bootstrapped into the paradigm.
> 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.
The Gentoo wiki was (is in many ways) phenomenal, and I recommend anyone interested in the inner workings of Linux at least walk through a full install from scratch - you learn a lot even just copying the instructions into the terminal.
According to my experience, yes, it is. I have used Gentoo (using its wiki to install and configure), then after a few distro hops I was at Arch Linux and the wiki was a blessing and ever since I have found it (>10 years), I never needed anything else. Stuff they have on there applies specifically AND generally. Whereas Gentoo's wiki is usually specific IIRC.
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.
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!
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 breakage that resulted was rococo. Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly, it was what drove the wiki and fixing all the things that pacman broke taught you a great deal and taught you quickly. Stability is not all that it is cracked up to be, has its uses but is not the solution to everything.
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 is systemd. Manjaro kind of feels like a mix between arch and slackware. (I compile from source, so I only need a base really for the most part, excluding a few things; I tend to disable most systemd unit files as I don't really need anything systemd offers. Sadly distributions such as slackware kind of died - they are not dead, but too slow in updates, no stable releases in years, this is the hallmark of deadness.)
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.
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.
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
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.
I also find myself using https://man.archlinux.org/ a lot. It's much more readable/user-friendly than https://man7.org plus it contains man-pages from their `extra` repo which contains a lot of popular oss tooling.
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.
Their wiki is what sold me on Arch. I ended up there solving most of my problems on other distros, and if they can make such a fine wiki, I figured they could make a great OS (which they did).
I came here to post a similar comment. I decided to use Arch because the documentation is amazing. And I wasn't disappointed. It's become my favorite distro.
Me too, I started with Debian but after a few weeks, I found myself being more on the Arch wiki than the Debian's one so I did the switch and never used any other distro.
I'm sorry to say this but Debian's documentation sucked a lot some years ago.
A thanks from me too! I do not use Arch, but still use the wiki as a primary reference to understand various tools. Two recent examples were CUPS and SANE:
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 problem to
different projects in general; in particular ruby-based projects tend
to have really low quality documentation (with some exceptions, e. g.
Jeremy Evans projects tend to have good quality documentation usually,
but that is a minority if you look at all the ruby projects - even
popular ones such as rack, ruby-wasm or ruby opal; horrible quality
or not even any real quality at all. And then rubyists wonder why
they lost to python ...)
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.
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.
Genuinely, the wiki, and the AUR are the two killer features that keep me on Arch (not that I have any reasons to change). Arch is an incredibly polished distro, and is a real pleasure to use.
I don't even use Arch, but I agree that their Wiki is awesome. Unless my problem is super obscure (and sometimes even then), I can nearly always find an answer there. But the best part is that it seems to be never incorrect, unlike essentially every other result in Google.
The quality of Arch wiki is the reason I could get into Linux. And that pretty much defined my career. So I, probably like many of us, owe a lot to the Arch Linux maintainers.
I do like the ArchWiki, but have found that some of their admins suffer from the same sort of petty tyranny and procedural injustice that commonly befalls internet moderation staff. I have seen the moderators go on unprompted rants against users in comment pages, be met with patience and understanding, and then try to hide the conversation when it wasn't going their way, without explanation.
I just hope they have robust backups and disaster-recovery plans, as Gentoo Wiki once had a terrible data loss, and it was like the burning of the Alexandria Library, I feel that put the distro to a decline. I don't use Arch (I used Gentoo in those times), but these collaborative knowledge bases are too precious to be lost.
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 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?
I agree. It reads like a cook book rather than a dictionary of tech specs. No spam getting in in the way of getting things running and getting things right; If you need details you can go to individual package docs from maintainers and project docs from devs, no need for misaligned redundancy. It is also pretty comprehensive, or at least I have not missed anything yet. And up to date. So, in my opinion, the best distro documentation I know of. And I like their community process too: The most trustworthy and reliable I have seen so far without a big corporation backing it up, except for maybe Debian. Let's keep the donations going, these good people deserve it!
As a Debian user I find myself more in the Archwiki.
Indeed one of the top resources for power users and sysadmins.
The Debian wiki has improved (from a total mess to the occasion helpful content).
Sadly it's orders of magnitudes away from the rigorous approach of the Archwiki.
> Indeed one of the top resources for power users and sysadmins
Back when I was just starting out with Ubuntu, the Arch wiki was super helpful to gain better understanding of various things I came across. I think the wiki in general is useful to anyone who wants to understand things deeper, not just power users and sysadmins :)
I also use ArchWiki as my personal software configuration journal. I know I'll be back to it when I'm going to have to re-install or re-configure something, so I make sure to record any new info I discover, worked out super well for me so far.
I really admire the maintainers' discipline with respects to grooming quality edits and fostering a welcoming environment. Incredibly patient folks in the interactions I've had.
Not to worry: I try a lot of distros and still use the Arch wiki regardless. There are some things that differ between distros, but it's pretty generally applicable:)
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 agree. Every time I visit the arch wiki or forums for that matter its typically due to a failure of the way the software is.
For example instead of the OS noticing that zstd was not supported, it would always use a zstd compressed initramfs image and would require the user to manually configure a supported compression their kernel supported. I don't understand why they thought it was a good idea to break my install for something that should be easy to do automatically. One could say that there is value in the forum having information on how to fix my system, but this isn't something I should have ever seen in the first place.
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.
reidrac|15 days ago
Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo!
lucideer|14 days ago
xattt|14 days ago
The wiki captures the knowledge that developers of said apps assume to be common, but don’t actually make sense unless you are bootstrapped into the paradigm.
rjzzleep|14 days ago
It is, didn't Gentoo suffer some sort of data loss which made it lose its popularity?
arendtio|14 days ago
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.
bombcar|14 days ago
johnisgood|15 days ago
MarsIronPI|13 days ago
alfiedotwtf|14 days ago
red-iron-pine|14 days ago
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
ofalkaed|15 days ago
assimpleaspossi|14 days ago
Only a Linux user would consider the instability of a Linux distro to be a good thing.
keysersoze33|15 days ago
Sadly, the edit volume will likely drop as LLMs are now the preferred source for technical Linux info/everything...
shevy-java|15 days ago
doubled112|15 days ago
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.
streetfighter64|15 days ago
This was still the case when I switched to arch in like 2016 lol
Erenay09|15 days ago
unknown|15 days ago
[deleted]
binsquare|15 days ago
I even bookmarked a page to remember how to rebuild the kernel because I can always expect it breaking.
estimator7292|14 days ago
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
kalterdev|15 days ago
ambicapter|14 days ago
thr0w4w4y1337|15 days ago
...a smooth sea never made a skilled sailor
Groxx|15 days ago
So +1000, I love their work, and all the contributors! It's so, so good, and greatly appreciated.
Pay08|15 days ago
mahmedtan|15 days ago
nextaccountic|15 days ago
even though there are tools to automatically generate man pages those days
Rayosay|15 days ago
noufalibrahim|15 days ago
razemio|15 days ago
ashikns|15 days ago
201984|15 days ago
beepbooptheory|15 days ago
e.g., NixOS just links to the archwiki page here for help with systemd timers: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Systemd/Timers
Doublon|15 days ago
ivanjermakov|14 days ago
duesabati|14 days ago
I'm sorry to say this but Debian's documentation sucked a lot some years ago.
Cyph0n|15 days ago
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CUPS
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SANE
myself248|14 days ago
What a concentration of knowledge. It's not always my first click for a given problem, but it's often my last.
shevy-java|15 days ago
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 problem to different projects in general; in particular ruby-based projects tend to have really low quality documentation (with some exceptions, e. g. Jeremy Evans projects tend to have good quality documentation usually, but that is a minority if you look at all the ruby projects - even popular ones such as rack, ruby-wasm or ruby opal; horrible quality or not even any real quality at all. And then rubyists wonder why they lost to python ...)
goku12|15 days ago
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.
randomtoast|14 days ago
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.
moxvallix|15 days ago
gucci-on-fleek|15 days ago
TiccyRobby|14 days ago
easygenes|4 days ago
fodkodrasz|15 days ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44900319
myself248|14 days ago
redox99|14 days ago
dietr1ch|15 days ago
canadiantim|15 days ago
agumonkey|15 days ago
duesabati|14 days ago
agoodusername63|14 days ago
I’ve always been dabbling in Linux since 2007 but I never really felt productive in it until i discovered arch. And it’s outstanding wiki
nathanmcrae|15 days ago
rurban|15 days ago
enoeht|15 days ago
VorpalWay|15 days ago
Do you know what the story was there, what happened? Why was it deleted?
czernobog|15 days ago
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.
elcdodedocle|14 days ago
hrtk|14 days ago
GuestFAUniverse|14 days ago
The Debian wiki has improved (from a total mess to the occasion helpful content). Sadly it's orders of magnitudes away from the rigorous approach of the Archwiki.
embedding-shape|14 days ago
Back when I was just starting out with Ubuntu, the Arch wiki was super helpful to gain better understanding of various things I came across. I think the wiki in general is useful to anyone who wants to understand things deeper, not just power users and sysadmins :)
foxrider|15 days ago
its-kostya|14 days ago
getpokedagain|14 days ago
Reading this has me looking for a junker laptop on eBay.
uticus|15 days ago
backscratches|14 days ago
sevensor|14 days ago
yanhangyhy|15 days ago
yjftsjthsd-h|15 days ago
mraza007|14 days ago
shmerl|15 days ago
unknown|15 days ago
[deleted]
31rf89e1f5e6|14 days ago
alexjj|1 day ago
kittbuilds|15 days ago
[deleted]
huflungdung|15 days ago
[deleted]
itvision|15 days ago
Mordisquitos|15 days ago
(I use Arch btw)
charcircuit|15 days ago
For example instead of the OS noticing that zstd was not supported, it would always use a zstd compressed initramfs image and would require the user to manually configure a supported compression their kernel supported. I don't understand why they thought it was a good idea to break my install for something that should be easy to do automatically. One could say that there is value in the forum having information on how to fix my system, but this isn't something I should have ever seen in the first place.
https://archlinux.org/news/moving-to-zstandard-images-by-def...
duckmysick|14 days ago
MathMonkeyMan|15 days ago
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.