[homebrewer]

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?

[haunter]

>Instead of creating multiple wikis with probably 80% of duplicate information between them

>why not try to turn it into a shared project?

This is basically both the highlight and the bane of the Linux world.

Why have another DE when there are already multiple ones? [0]

Why have another package manager when there are already multiple ones? [1]

Why have another distro when there are already multiple ones? [2]

So having another wiki makes perfect sense (or not depending on your POV)

0, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_X_Window_System_...

1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_package_manag...

2, https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

[zahlman]

>Why make a green bikeshed when there's already a red bikeshed?

Because then you have two bikesheds. An important aspect of the fact that the bikeshed exists, as a separate entity not integrated with the house, is that you can choose a different one. Specifically, the one that's already painted the way you want.

Maybe you don't think this is a feature in your current circumstance. Others do, which is why it persists.

[account42]

Bane? It's what makes the Linux desktop great. I get to choose a system that works like I want.

Imagine if there was only Gnome or whatever unholy monstrosity is the most popular DE these days.

[BirAdam]

If there were only one, someone would launch a new one within a week. Just how Linux is.

[kbolino]

What matters in the long run for making a good wiki are the people and policies.

Young and niche wikis are happy to take any contributions they can get. The quality and timeliness of any given bit of text soon ends up wildly different from page to page or even section to section. Some people may decide to take their time not just contributing new content but also editing existing content. However, it becomes difficult to balance creation vs. curation. Too much creation, and the editors get overwhelmed, and then the users can never be sure what to trust, and so the wiki becomes irrelevant. Too much curation, and the information becomes uniformly stale and lowest-common-denominator, so the users start going elsewhere, and so the wiki becomes irrelevant.

Different wikis means each one can have its own people and policies. If the people who made one wiki great leave, there are still other wikis out there. If the policies choke the life out of one wiki, there are still other wikis out there. Some wiki can be full of deletionists while another wiki is full of inclusionists. Some wiki can be full of mergers while another wiki is full of splitters.

Forcing everybody onto one wiki forces them all to work together, but this is an entirely volunteer effort, and so many will just leave. Even if they were paid, some individuals would dominate while others would get crowded out. One can point to Wikipedia as a glaring exception, standing as basically the only wiki of note of its kind, but I think it's the exception that proves the rule.

[kayodelycaon]

Wikipedia is definitely the exception. It works because almost everyone on the Internet uses it.

[account42]

And it's not without problems, not the least of with is that being the default Wiki attracts the kind of people would would love to control the definite source of information.

[slightwinder]

It probably just never worked out that way. Usually everyone starts with documenting the distro-specific parts first, and then adds more and more, until even general parts are there. But at the same time, everyone probably thinks that those general parts are supposed in the specific projects' documentation, so nobody really cares about sharing. Until the point is reached that some wiki is so big and successful, that it just silently took over the whole domain.

Also, the whole sharing somehow seems to have died off over the decades. 25+ years ago, when wiki was new and shiny and everyone was experimental and motivated, there were strong movements for interwiki-content, sharing stuff between them openly. Then time happened, not much sharing was done, and every wiki-software slowly moved on, doing their own thing, becoming some semi-open silo or even a closed garden.

And today we had this same movement arising in the knowledge management-community, around their tools, and mainly in the context of Markdown, and it also kinda died down and never turned into anything substantial. Maybe, in the end, sharing information and knowledge is a bit harder to execute than it seems?

[zdragnar]

I think the sharing is easy. The maintaining is hard when there isn't clear ownership. How do the teams divide maintenance duties? How are vandalism and moderation dealt with across teams? How do disagreements between teams over style and quality dealt with? Cost of hosting split?

All of these are possible to answer, but they are also much easier to deal with when you're not sharing between different organizations.

[slightwinder]

> I think the sharing is easy

The hard part about sharing is the different syntax of wikis, which could be slightly different even in the same wiki-software. Then there is the organization-part, and the sync-process itself.

Of course, today, 25 years later, we do have better solutions and much more experience for those problems.

> The maintaining is hard when there isn't clear ownership. How do the teams divide maintenance duties? How are vandalism and moderation dealt with across teams?

I would think those are pretty simply, as they all follow the same rules. I mean, handling vandalism isn't much different between Arch or Debian, it's always the same. And moderation really depends on the chosen sharing-mechanism. Which brings up again the hard part, just on a different level.

[kelvinjps10]

I think it's more of, let's say, unify the 2 wikis in one, what team should moderate Debian's or Arch's, and which rules should be applied Debian's or Arch's?

[lukan]

"Maybe, in the end, sharing information and knowledge is a bit harder to execute than it seems?"

Or ... instead of admitting something, we can also just find a scapegoat instead. Let's say bad coorporations somehow prevented it?

On the other hand, sharing information is easy. The hard part is in trusting that information in the time and age of spam, propaganda and advertisers. And companies are quite secretive and don't want to share too much by default for other reasons.

Also it is way easier just do something to your own wiki, than coordinate with dozens of others where you share something.

I have many vague and some concrete ideas since a while about building trust right into the wiki system somehow, but never got around to actually implement something. Because ah well, I have to admit. It really ain't trivial after all, solving human trust.

[slightwinder]

> Let's say bad coorporations somehow prevented it?

How?

> On the other hand, sharing information is easy.

Not in the way we are talking about.

> The hard part is in trusting that information in the time and age of spam

No, it's not. We're talking here about moderated Knowledge bases. Of course, if it's a poor or even unmoderated wiki, this would be a problem. But I've never got the impression that Arch-wiki had this problem.

> don't want to share too much by default for other reasons.

Sharing what? This is about open source? Is this AI-slope? O_o

> Also it is way easier just do something to your own wiki, than coordinate with dozens of others where you share something.

I don't think Arch-Wiki has only one maintainer.

[lukan]

"Sharing what? This is about open source?"

About sharing information in general.

Wikis work in a open way, if they are niche, to not attract trolls or spam too much, otherwise they work by restricting guest rights, banning ip, etc. Usually pragmatically.

"No, it's not. We're talking here about moderated Knowledge bases. Of course, if it's a poor or even unmoderated wiki, this would be a problem. But I've never got the impression that Arch-wiki had this problem."

And arch wiki (and wikipedia itself) is a outlier, not the average wiki, that usually is outdated or plain wrong with no one caring.

[kelipso]

I remember a while ago there was a small computer vision wiki that was very useful and somewhat widely used, not that many computer vision people at the time. Then, after around 2010 they decided to move the wiki to Wikipedia. You can guess what happened, original wiki was gone, very few articles survived because, of course, it's Wikipedia. A great resource just gone.

[kzrdude]

If the scope is too wide, then it's hard to see when content is outdated or irrelevant. The clear focus helps archwiki for example to not turn into a graveyard of obsolete howtos.

[WhyNotHugo]

> Instead of creating multiple wikis with probably 80% of duplicate information between them

Wikis do tend to link a lot across one another. On the Alpine Wiki, I prefer to link to the ArchWiki when applicable, rather than copy content over.

[delfinom]

> it would be great to have a cross distribution wiki with separate sections for distribution-specific instructions where it makes sense.

This doesn't work as well as you think.

We did this in one large OSS project for documenting operations just for installs/setup/build/etc.

The problem is:

1. The list of differences get large fast if you aren't within the same family of OS like Debian/Ubuntu/Mint

2. Information will get out of date for some distros over others. Unhelpful pricks start bitching and moaning and nobody wants to deal with it at that point.

3. Unhelpful pricks will also bitch and moan you delete the out of date sections

[bawolff]

I don't know if i agree. Good documentation is focused. If you try to cover everything it becomes dilluted and confusing.

[noirscape]

In the case of Debian, they have a pretty different stance when it comes to what the role of a distro is compared to Arch.

Arch is essentially completely freeform; you, the user, are going to be making a lot of technical decisions on what you want your system to look like. It's perfectly okay for Arch to ship 4 different versions of the same type of tool, as long as all 4 are being used. The Arch wiki reflects this; it's focused around giving you a lot of options, while not going too in-depth on what you'd want to do with them. Want to swap out NetworkManager for wpa_supplicant because wpa_supplicant is easier to configure from a terminal? Perfectly fine, go ahead. Most arch packages as a result don't heavily deviate from upstream unless it's absolutely necessary to get them running.

Debian uh... isn't that. Debian still offers choice, but Debian has set the unenviable goal for themselves to provide a "stable" userland experience. This means Debian offers less options, but the options they do offer are also fixed on certain versions with sometimes pretty derivative versions compares to upstream. Their documentation as a result can get much more in-depth, just by virtue of having less to cover than Arch does.

A basic example here is setting up a webserver stack (so webserver, php and mysql); on Debian, you pick between apache2(+mod_php) or nginx/php-fpm and install mysql. Debian takes care of wiring all the permissions, user groups and all that stuff and giving you a "sane" default folder capable of serving PHP scripts on port 80 that anyone can use. It's a lot easier and nginx' configuration is specifically changed to resemble the apache2 vhosts. Arch doesn't do this; arch gives you the upstream versions of all these packages and then asks you to wire them together so that they work.

It means they attract pretty different audiences as a result; Debian users value stability/set and forget (also helped by Debian release cycles basically lasting the same length as most LTS releases of other distros), while Arch users are more conditioned to having to occasionally change their config files on updates.

That's also reflected in what their wikis aim at. Debian wikis generally can be version locked to their release; Arch wiki needs constant updating as things change.

They're different extremes here; most distros usually sit on one side or the other of this sorta thing (with the only real correlation being that dpkg-based distros usually lean more towards the Debian model), but there's also the pseudo-rolling release distros like Fedora, which try to offer similar stability to Debian but much shorter release cycles, so you'll always be running something at least close to the latest version.

[pessimizer]

> Their documentation as a result can get much more in-depth, just by virtue of having less to cover than Arch does.

But the entire point is how much better Arch's wiki is than anyone else's. I've never run Arch, I've only ever used Arch's wiki to help with Debian. Doing this ironically helps you keep in mind every weird Debianism to figure out how to apply what you're reading.

[layer8]

There are not just differences between distributions to consider, but also different distributions being on different versions of things. This would be difficult to organize.

[wolvesechoes]

What would be even better - just a single, unified distro. Imagine if all those man-hours where actually focused on delivering a single working and polished FOSS OS.

I know, FOSS is all about choice, yada yada.

[tremon]

Then you get to handle all the same criticisms that are usually lobbed at MS Office: no single user ever needs more than 15% of the functionality, but still receives the additional baggage of the other 85% -- whether in terms of memory footprint, reduced performance or UI clutter. The ability of FOSS to be optimized for specific use cases is one of its biggest strengths, and that has nothing to do with "choice" itself, no matter how much you try to disparage it.

[zahlman]

Except that a lot of FOSS ends up pulling in huge dependencies to use tiny parts of them, doesn't tree-shake (granted not all languages make this easy), vendors a specific version of something you already have that would work fine, etc.

[wolvesechoes]

And I thought that free software is about human freedom.

Well, enjoy your optimized memory consumption instead.

[const_cast]

Human freedom includes the freedom to fork.

What you're proposing is actually making the Linux kernel and userland closed source and controlled by a company like Microsoft.

There is simply no other way to get "one distro"

[wolvesechoes]

> Human freedom includes the freedom to fork.

It also includes the freedom to choose any product from the shelf in any store. But let's have a thought experiment - does the society that allows completely free consumption of material goods, but punishes any criticism against the government, economical policy etc. has more freedom than society that have some prohibition on consumption, yet allows free speech and political action?

There is more than one facet of freedom, and personally I care more about collective freedom of the people and it would be served better by having few, but more polished FOSS options when it comes down to technology.

> What you're proposing is actually making the Linux kernel and userland closed source and controlled by a company like Microsoft.

I am not proposing anything. I am saying we would all be better if FOSS contributors focused and consolidated their effort.

> There is simply no other way to get "one distro"

You are probably right, this is why I am pessimist.

[const_cast]

> I am not proposing anything. I am saying we would all be better if FOSS contributors focused and consolidated their effort.

Sure, and then maybe after that we can also solve world hunger and then all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.

What you want is worthless, actually, if you don't have a plan on how to get there. We all want more polished software, less CO2 in the air, and more butter on movie theater popcorn.

If you want people to not fork, then you're either going to have to invent mind control or force people not to fork.

Well option 1 hasn't been invented yet. And option 2 is called closed source software.

[tremon]

I'm not sure I understand your position. You seem to be saying that allowing customization is bad for human freedom? Would you mind ELI5'ing that for me?

[wolvesechoes]

See my reply to sibling comment.

What is customization, if all you can customize are countless half-baked distros for tinkerers, teared through constant drama, ambitions of snowflake devs trying to make 100 competing solutions obsolete by introducing 101st, and forking, and, as a typical non-dev computer user, you are more and more dependent on adversary Big Techs?

If Cyberpunk dystopia ever comes, I am sure we still will be able to choose between GNOME and KDE, and there will be people saying that we are still good, for we have a choice.

[pessimizer]

Some corporate entity will just take it over and Linux will just be another piece of software constantly trying to figure out ways to rob you.

Fragmentation, though ugly and inconvenient, works as a defense. systemd, along with all of the other goofy all-encompassing subsystems that were inflicted on Linux over one hot decade from Red Hat, was obviously a ploy to do the above. The jury is still out as to whether it will be successful.

[wolvesechoes]

But I believe there is a degree of fragmentation. If the fragmentation would look like this that we have, for example, just Debian, Arch and Fedora, we would still have a choice and escape hatches, and I wouldn't complain, even if it would be less effective than single distro.

[bitwize]

That's part of what systemd is supposed to do: make distros irrelevant by providing a uniform software base, after which redundant distros would wither and die, yielding a few main ones which are cross-compatible with one another in terms of how they are configured.

[WD-42]

You realize people do this for fun right? It’s fun to create your own distro (you should try it some time) and it’s fun to play with different ones as well.

Nobody wants Linux to be more like windows, and otherwise they’d just use windows.

[wolvesechoes]

> You realize people do this for fun right? It’s fun to create your own distro (you should try it some time) and it’s fun to play with different ones as well.

I do, and this is why FOSS cannot reach its political goals - it won't ensure user's freedom, for almost everyone involved today would rather chase their own satisfaction.

[pessimizer]

It already insures user freedom, and has for decades. The lecturing is a bad tone. You wouldn't even know this was possible if GNU, Debian, and Linux in general hadn't done it. They shaped your understanding of software.

[wolvesechoes]

I have no issue with GNU, Linux or Debian. The opposite, I am postulating that we would all be better if every one worked on those instead of creating yet another distro or grep clone, even if they provide their creators with satisfaction.

As for ensuring - how it is, that in 2025 AD we have more FOSS projects than ever, yet your typical computer user has less freedom and privacy than, let's say, in 2000 AD?

[cma]

I'm glad ripgrep exists and also glad grep itself doesn't try to parse .gitingore

[burntsushi]

Bad take. If you can only ever improve what's there, there is no opportunity to try something new. For grep specifically, you can't much about its defaults, which makes "innovating" on its user experience very difficult.

[dessimus]

>it won't ensure user's freedom, for almost everyone involved today would rather chase their own satisfaction.

Why should my freedom to build my own distro that I choose to distribute for my reasons be squashed so some hypothetical "user" who might come along and have spoon-fed documentation?

Furthermore, the skillsets of writing good documentation and technical problem solving needed to build and roll out a distro are not 1-to-1.

[Ferret7446]

You're using the wrong definition of freedom. It's not an issue that FOSS doesn't reach your definition of freedom

[lupusreal]

The "political goals" are pretty fringe, to most people that enjoy FOSS, the goal is to get something that works for themselves and if other people don't like it, that's fine. Most people aren't RMS style revolutionaries trying to convert the global population to FOSS users. I admire that man, but his goals aren't my goals.

For that matter, if political victory were to be achieved in the way you've suggested, it would be utterly Pyrrhic. The only way to achieve a unified singular FOSS operating system that nobody forks or otherwise competes with would be to strip users of their freedoms to do so. So that's not a victory at all for the political side of FOSS.

You might conclude then that FOSS victory is impossible. I think so too, and that's fine. It doesn't stop FOSS from being useful to me and many other people. Some people will never use it, and that's fine.

[wolvesechoes]

But I didn't stated at any point I would like to prevent people from forking or starting something from scratch. I only stated that if FOSS contributors would focus their efforts more, we all would be in a better place.

That they won't, I agree, for, as this thread shows, libertarian and individualist ideas are stronger in this demographics. I also agree that FOSS is useful even in its current state, but being useful is not a goal of free software. Freedom is a political notion.

And common people do not need to care that much about free software ideas to consider political goals of the movement to be fulfilled, the same way today's workers do not need to care about socialist theory to enjoy workers rights.

[lupusreal]

The only way to stop people from forking and pursuing their own interests is to forbid them from doing so. Only thus is your wish fulfilled.

[delfinom]

>I admire that man,

He's a pdf file, there's not much to admire.

[Ferret7446]

Friendly warning that libel is bad and illegal, even if it's hard to prosecute.

[account42]

That would be horrible.

[_ea1k]

Yep, and who cares about the FOSS OS part? We could combine Macos and Windows too! Think of all the money and time that could be saved by having a single global unified OS team!

I know, people have difference preferences, yada yada.

[wolvesechoes]

> We could combine Macos and Windows too!

It wouldn't produce a FOSS OS, as they are not FOSS.

Try more.