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I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
- dietr1ch 7mo agoI don't use Arch anymore, yet I still find myself reading their wiki from time to time. It's a phenomenal resource.
- canadiantim 7mo agoWhat are you using now?
- dietr1ch 7mo agoNixOS. Having a config-defined system is a bit too different at first, but really nice when it comes to system reproducibility, and being able to roll back. It made maintaining my laptop + workstations the "same" a breeze, although it took a bit to learn and settle into something that works for me. It seems today things are easier for newcomers, but Nix Flakes are still "experimental", and thus the documentation on things might seem confusing or misleading sometimes.
- etyhhgfff 7mo agoNix Flakes are around for years and still experimental?
- colordrops 7mo agoThe word experimental has no meaning here anymore. I forgot the last time that someone brought that up.
- dietr1ch 7mo agoYup. I wish they graduate soon, they have been great for a long while. I'm not sure what's blocking them today. I just use them like they are stable and will deal with any breakages later. I doubt any breakage will be too bad and that it'd even affect me.
- gucci-on-fleek 7mo agoI 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.
- yanhangyhy 7mo agoMe too. I tried various of distros before, archwiki is the best thing. I learned so much Linux knowledge from it.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7mo agoNot 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:)
- mahmedtan 7mo agoI also find myself using https://man.archlinux.org/ https://man.archlinux.org/ a lot. It's much more readable/user-friendly than https://man7.org https://man7.org plus it contains man-pages from their `extra` repo which contains a lot of popular oss tooling.
- nextaccountic 7mo agounfortunately 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
- beej71 7mo agoI agree. If it can be launched from the command line, it deserves a man page.
- wpm 7mo agoI 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".
- Brian_K_White 7mo agoThen again, the built-in help can not be seperated from the binary and be missing at run-time.
- nextaccountic 7mo agoFor Rust programs there's https://docs.rs/clap_mangen/0.2.31/clap_mangen/ https://docs.rs/clap_mangen/0.2.31/clap_mangen/ that will generate a man page out of the help. (I am sure most programming languages have something like this). However, that's only useful if you are compiling the program (maybe distros could patch Rust programs to generate the man page during the build process) A more general tool would be pretty good. Either for distros to call during build, after building the program proper; or for users to call. If users are calling directly, it would be useful to, by default, show the regular man page if it exists, and only if it doesn't exist generate and display one out of --help. Also give it the same flags as man etc. In this case, we could do alias man=better_man and pretend this problem is already solved (but it's still better if distros generate it, so that they can display the man page on the web, etc)
- uticus 7mo agoaaaaand you can download it: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=94201 https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=94201
- backscratches 7mo agoAlso available as a .zim file for Kiwix (which also includes packages of offline wikipedia <100GB). https://browse.library.kiwix.org/viewer#archlinux_en_all_maxi_2025-09/Main_page https://browse.library.kiwix.org/viewer#archlinux_en_all_max...
- 201984 7mo agoTheir 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).
- Doublon 7mo agoI 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.
- beepbooptheory 7mo agoI was definitely the same way at one point but it's worth mentioning that the wiki remains a valuable resource even if you aren't using Arch itself. e.g., NixOS just links to the archwiki page here for help with systemd timers: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Systemd/Timers https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Systemd/Timers
- duesabati 7mo agoMe 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.
- ivanjermakov 7mo agoYep. Wiki and AUR completeness are hard to pass by.
- huflungdung 7mo ago[dead]
- ofalkaed 7mo agoI 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.
- assimpleaspossi 7mo ago>>Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly Only a Linux user would consider the instability of a Linux distro to be a good thing.
- badgersnake 7mo agoIf your goal is to learn how it works this was great, a new challenge every day. Perhaps we need a chaosmonkey Linux distro. Also FreeBSD did this well recently, migrating libc and libsys in the wrong order so you have no kernel API. That was fun.
- KAMSPioneer 7mo agoI was hit with that on a remote box in another country! Should have researched the upgrade more before I did it, but it is a personal thing and not work. However, my IPMI motherboard and FreeBSD's integrated ZFS boot environments might be considered cheating...
- encom 7mo agoYou don't become a mechanic without fixing broken down cars. So in that sense, the shittier the car, the better. My Linux story is similar. In retrospect I learned it on hard mode, because Gentoo was the first distro I used (as in really used). And Gentoo, especially back around 2004 or so, really gave you fully automatic, armour-piercing, double-barreled footguns.
- Cyph0n 7mo agoA 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: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CUPS https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CUPS https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SANE https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SANE
- myself248 7mo agoI don't use Arch either, but both of those links show as visited in my browser! What a concentration of knowledge. It's not always my first click for a given problem, but it's often my last.
- moxvallix 7mo agoGenuinely, 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.
- noufalibrahim 7mo agoI'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.
- razemio 7mo agoI 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.
- VorpalWay 7mo agoAUR is particularly useful because Arch has really simple build scripts. They are bash with some particular function names that you need to define (like "build" and "check") and a few bits of package metadata in variables. Pretty intelligible even if you don't know the format beforehand. Contrast that with Debian build scripts which I never managed to figure out. It's dozens of layers of helpers for "common cases" with lots of Makefile magic. Completely inscrutable if you aren't already a Debian package maintainer. Very compact though.
- ashikns 7mo agoArch wiki is something special. It is astounding how diverse and detailed (and yet concise) it is.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- enoeht 7mo agogentoo forums & wiki initially were the goto place until it was deleted.
- VorpalWay 7mo agoI 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?
- czernobog 7mo agoIt 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.
- shmerl 7mo agoArchWiki is great. Lot's of useful details for any Linux user.
- nathanmcrae 7mo agoAside, but it's pretty neat that the author has been semi-regularly posting on their blog for over 20 years.
- rurban 7mo agoNeat? I would use other words. Fraudsters rely on marketing. https://danielpocock.com/en/matthias-fsfe-analogous-identity-fraud/ https://danielpocock.com/en/matthias-fsfe-analogous-identity...
- foxrider 7mo agoI 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.
- Groxx 7mo agoThe 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.
- Pay08 7mo agoA lot of pages are very bare or outdated, it should absolutely not be anything besides the default Arch wiki.
- shevy-java 7mo agoThe 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 ...)
- goku12 7mo agoArch 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.
- 7mo ago
- itvision 7mo agoThis wiki exemplifies how broken Linux (on desktop) is and it's weird Linux fans ignore this fact.
- MathMonkeyMan 7mo agoIt 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.
- miladyincontrol 7mo agoThe idea of arch was never that its "supposed to be hard mode", its meant to hit what many of it's users consider the sweet spot of not being too opinionated but not leaving every single factor up to the user either. For many people that balance makes it in fact easymodo. Calling it hard mode is putting it on a pedestal, a weird one that ignores much less opinionated linux distros and setups like Gentoo.
- Mordisquitos 7mo agoI'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)
- itvision 7mo agoThis 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 https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU
- kittbuilds 7mo ago[dead]
- reidrac 7mo agoVery 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!
- alfiedotwtf 7mo agoGlad 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!
- MarsIronPI 7mo agoYes, 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.
- johnisgood 7mo agoAccording 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.
- lucideer 7mo agoGentoo'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.
- account42 7mo agoI think the Gentoo wiki that gp is referring to is the old gentoo-wiki.info that went down after a hardware failure or something like that and never came back. The wiki.gentoo.org we have now restores some of that but probably not everything - and there was a void left between them that let the Arch wiki gain mindshare.
- agumonkey 7mo agoI'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.
- duesabati 7mo agoI 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
- agumonkey 7mo agoAnd 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.
- fodkodrasz 7mo agoI 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44900319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44900319
- redox99 7mo agoWouldn't everything be on the internet archive? And common crawl?
- aeroevan 7mo agoBeing on the internet archive and being able to pick up from a restored backup are two very different things
- redox99 7mo agoIt's a wiki. Maybe you lose the edit history and stuff like that, but the actual content which is what matters should be very easy to recreate from those sources.
- myself248 7mo agoI download the Kiwix copy of the Arch wiki every year or two, as my offline source of linux knowledge in case I find myself offline for some reason.
- GuestFAUniverse 7mo agoAs 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.
- embedding-shape 7mo ago> 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 :)
- getpokedagain 7mo agoI've had a Mac rather than a Linux machine at home for the last five or so years. Before that the arch wiki saved the day for me so many times. Reading this has me looking for a junker laptop on eBay.
- sevensor 7mo agoI switched from Fedora in 2013 because the ArchWiki was answering all of my questions. It’s very, very good.
- hrtk 7mo agoArch wiki is one of the reasons I stick to Arch as my daily driver
- 31rf89e1f5e6 7mo agoI for one, find that blue Arch Linux sweater he's wearing to be 10/10. Super cute.
- alexjj 7mo agoThe next question is then, "and where can I get one?"
- elcdodedocle 7mo agoI 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!
- mraza007 7mo agoIt’s one of the best resources out there which helped me learn linux
- TiccyRobby 7mo agoThe 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.
- agoodusername63 7mo agoI am not exaggerating slightly when I say that arch wiki taught me how to use Linux 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
- QuantumNoodle 7mo agoI 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.
- easygenes 7mo agoI 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.