The Arch wiki is one of the best things the Linux community has produced. It's like a modern, improved and more complete version of TLDP.

I haven't even used Arch on any of my machines but can't count how many times I've found their wiki useful for my workstations, servers and even custom Yocto-built systems. Arch supports many ways of doing a thing, so whatever tool I'm dealing with, Arch probably supports that and documents it on the wiki. And Arch makes few changes from upstream so the wiki instructions are often applicable on any distro. Sure, it takes some familiarity to recognize when something is e.g. Debian-specific and should be done in a Debian way, but as a user fairly familiar with Linux, I often find Arch to be the best source of documentation.

Instead of creating multiple wikis with probably 80% of duplicate information between them, it would be great to have a cross distribution wiki with separate sections for distribution-specific instructions where it makes sense. Gentoo had a fantastic wiki before they lost it to disk array failure (IIRC) around ten years ago, now pretty much everyone is going to the Arch wiki, why not try to turn it into a shared project?

I"m still absolutely floored with how good the archwiki is. I can't hype it up enough. I really did't know what I was doing with systemd until I read that wonderful article, and also, the link to why the arch maintainer switched that distro to systemd made my accept the change to it.

Documentation is super important for complex things. I feel like it’s highly underrated by many otherwise great open source projects, to the severe detriment of the project. Nice to see an explicit focus on it.

I shall edit more in the Wiki and post less here.

The Wiki is the stronghold of Arch. As are the the packages. A lot of stuff makes good things good is a lot manual labor by all involved people.

PS: Removing stuff or not accepting changes is also a significant part of the Wiki. It hurts, as usual. But necessary for readability.

Hopefully they share it with NixOS next

Look at the "ArchWiki active users per month" graph. What happened in 2013? With the exception of the lockdown period, it has been decreasing since then.

For lwn.net articles, aren't these subscriber-only links meant to be used only by the subscriber? Is sharing them on HN sabotaging lwn?

I found myself on Arch Wiki for so many non-Arch issues that I decided that I'll just install Arch and use it.

One feature I wish the Arch wiki had last time I used it was conditionally hiding sections. It presented various options throughout their guides and depending on which options you chose later sections weren't relevant. I often found I'd get partway through a step only to discover it wasn't relevant.

It would be great if, when presented with different options, you could indicate which one you'd selected and have it hide the irrelevant stuff further down the page

The Arch wiki is the PostgreSQL documentation of Linux. Even if you're not using Arch or Postgres, it's a great starting point for how something is supposed to work and it covers enough details that you can extrapolate a bit.

> We are still quite a small wiki compared to Wikipedia

A small intermediate goal for ArchWiki

It's one the reasons I'm using Arch. Great features are worth little to me if I don't know about them. What I like particularly about the wiki is their why sections that explain why one would want to choose one way over another. A good example of this is the page on data-at-rest encryption [1].

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Data-at-rest_encryption

This seems heavy on self-promotion. Meanwhile, Arch is still x86-centric (in spite of fragmented, unofficial forks) and doesn't do LTS, while Debian supports multiple architectures and stability. Debian does have a lot of rambling, aspirationally-unfinished, outdated, and duplicated wiki pages.

This is really exciting. I've used the Arch Wiki countless times for setting up or configuring something in Debian but wanting a resource more native to the platform. I hope they're able to produce a comparable wiki for Debian-based OSes.

> MediaWiki markup is different. It is weird and fragile; changing a single token can completely break a page. It is also, he said, difficult to write a proper or robust parser for the language.

Good thing mwparserfromhell exists, then.

I went to install debian recently, but ended up with ubuntu because debian docs were so convoluted. Could not find the minimal iso I was looking for

I hope debian sees improvement here with this announcement

On the topic of Arch wiki, I know there are a couple of offline and cli / tui solutions. Which do you use and recommend?

I switched from Ubuntu to Arch because of the quality of the Arch wiki. Ubuntu search results were filled with so much misinformation that I realized it was a culture problem. Arch, with its higher barrier to entry, attracts users who maintain its standards.

It's great to see such inter-project information sharing and cooperation!

This obsession with changing what works for something else to please some shady people is annoying

This conformism is painful to witness, it happens to everything internet related, and the goal here seems to be related to the idea that internet should require a digital ID/wallet to browse

Sad era to live in

Make a wiki with Markdown syntax and GIT backend.

The Arch Linux community is one of the most toxic I know. First and foremost, there are members with tens of thousands of posts who become condescending and insulting when other members don’t dance to their tune. The Code of Conduct exists only on paper and is not enforced by the Arch leadership. This results in such behavior not only being tolerated but actively encouraged. Shame on them and shame on Debian for further encouraging this behaviour by inviting them to the DebConf.