I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers

ofalkaed an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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kalterdev 6 minutes ago | parent [-]

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

	▲	Semaphor 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet That does sound significantly longer ago then 2016 ;)

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moxvallix 5 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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mahmedtan 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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nextaccountic an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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

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wpm an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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".

	▲	Brian_K_White 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Then again, the built-in help can not be seperated from the binary and be missing at run-time.

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beej71 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree. If it can be launched from the command line, it deserves a man page.

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Rayosay an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

That's great! I didn't know that Arch had online manpages too. I frequently use https://manpages.debian.org/ for similar reasons.

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Cyph0n 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/CUPS

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SANE

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201984 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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).

	▲	beepbooptheory an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I 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
	▲	Doublon 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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dietr1ch 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't use Arch anymore, yet I still find myself reading their wiki from time to time. It's a phenomenal resource.

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canadiantim 36 minutes ago | parent [-]

What are you using now?

	▲	dietr1ch 4 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		NixOS. 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.

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gucci-on-fleek 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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yanhangyhy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Me too. I tried various of distros before, archwiki is the best thing. I learned so much Linux knowledge from it.

	▲	yjftsjthsd-h 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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:)

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uticus 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

aaaaand you can download it: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=94201