[neilv]

I love that wiki.archlinux.org is a top-Pinned.

I'm firmly a Debian shop, but I find that the Arch Linux wiki often answers non-distro-specific questions that I have about how to do something on Debian.

(Especially since I'm usually using Xmonad without a lot of the "desktop environment" stuff.)

[hx8]

The Arch Linux Wiki has some awesome information, but it's a little too informal for it to be a go-to for me. It's information is incomplete, opinionated, and sometimes has a "works on my machine" sort of a vibe.

But sometimes it just has the answer you need in an easily digestible format. Top 10 source for me, but not a top 3.

-- Some nerd with almost two decades of distro-hopping experience.

[neilv]

Yeah, I don't expect comprehensive and definitive documentation from it, nor copy&paste answers.

But for getting pointed in the right direction about things that have been obscured by the desktop environments, and then left largely undocumented nowadays, the Arch Linux wiki usually points me in the right direction.

Much of it would be pretty confusing to someone who only wanted high-level documentation in terms of the Gnome Desktop or KDE Plasma, though.

[saghm]

> But for getting pointed in the right direction about things that have been obscured by the desktop environments, and then left largely undocumented nowadays, the Arch Linux wiki usually points me in the right direction.

Even as an Arch user, probably at least 80% of my usage of the Arch Wiki is just going through "Troubleshooting" list of previously seen issues and solutions for whatever thing I'm dealing with. I don't go in expecting that everything will work exactly the same for me, but over the years I've ended up with quite a few headaches solved by pasting the right line in the right conf from one of those sections.

[hx8]

Oh it's really cool that you've used the arch wiki in that way. I had already done Linux From Scatch before I ran across the Arch wiki, so I was already familiar with concepts like boot loaders, kernel modules, and daemons. I mostly used it to find some sane config file values.

[neilv]

Similar here (25+ years Linux experience, including making my own distro). Personally, I use the Arch wiki for pointers to the current way to do system-level things, which has changed over time, with kernel and userland (e.g., all the things systemd changed, and for various kinds of devices), and sometimes for applications (e.g., what programs are currently available to do some small thing).

Maybe the value comes not just because they bother to maintain a wiki, but that Arch Linux tends to select for above-average technical people, even more than Linux in general does. (Even if Arch people strangely don't run Debian goodness; but we benefit from a diversity of perspectives, even if they are unexplained. :)

[eddythompson80]

I often wish there was a date attached to the articles there. I get that a wiki format is ever evolving and as a result there isn’t necessarily a meaningful date that could be added. However, unlike an article about Jupiter, carbon fiber or WW2 on Wikipedia, the date for when a guide was written about Power Management on Linux is very relevant. I often find myself trying to sort of deduce that from the history page, then I fail then I have to go look up if that information is in fact the most recent.

[ddtaylor]

I agree and I have to tell newer users all the time the wiki is very valuable regardless of if you use arch or not btw

[switch007]

It's so good it's made me question if it would be easier just to switch to Arch (so all the help would be directly applicable)

[Cyph0n]

The Arch Linux wiki is an absolute goldmine.

I briefly used Manjaro, Debian and Ubuntu before that, and now am primarily a NixOS user, yet I still find myself coming back to the wiki.