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by stinkytaco 3027 days ago
If only Debian had the documentation that Arch does. I know there's man and help, but the Debian wiki seems sparse and out of date, where the Arch wiki is incredibly thorough. Sometimes I find myself at the Arch wiki to do things in Debian, but that doesn't always work. So I generally stick to Fedora, which at least sticks close to upstream.
3 comments

This used to be a thing! I remember the first time I installed Debian (back in the 2.0 days, I think) and it came with the "HOWTO" packages, which were essentially precursors to the semi free-format Arch wiki. That's how I learned how to configure kernel modules, what the difference between installing Linux using UMSDOS vs. a real partition, and even how ReiserFS worked.

I really feel like easy internet access has taken good documentation away from us. It's too easy to Google for something, find some crappy blog with barely enough instructions to fix the problem. We've become reactive, rather than pro-actively educating ourselves.

Everybody on every Linux that isn't Arch either uses the Arch Wiki already, or should.
No matter what distro I use, I end up falling back on the Arch wiki and Gentoo wiki.

I find the Gentoo wiki has the clearest information about specific things, and the Arch wiki has the clearest information on how to put them together.

Most packages have pretty good documentation about anything Debian-specific installed in /usr/share/doc/<packagename>/README.Debian[.gz] and /usr/share/doc/<packagename>/NEWS.Debian[.gz].