[shevy-java]

The ArchWiki is indeed pretty good. I used to prefer the gentoo wiki back in the days but I think the ArchWiki may be better at this point in time.

It's also interesting to see that many other Linux distributions fail to have any wiki at all, yet alone one that has high quality content. This is especially frustrating because Google search got so worse now that finding resources is hard. I tried to explain this problem to different projects in general; in particular ruby-based projects tend to have really low quality documentation (with some exceptions, e. g. Jeremy Evans projects tend to have good quality documentation usually, but that is a minority if you look at all the ruby projects - even popular ones such as rack, ruby-wasm or ruby opal; horrible quality or not even any real quality at all. And then rubyists wonder why they lost to python ...)

[goku12]

Arch wiki is indeed the most informative and comprehensive of all, so much so that users of any distro should find it useful too. Two other distro wikis with smaller, but useful content are Gentoo's and Debian's. Gentoo's speciality in my opinion, is that it contains some lower level information like the required kernel features, and difference between setups using systemd and other inits. Debian wiki contains some information that's related to standards, development, packaging and quality control. These make them useful, despite the availability of the Arch wiki.

Though not distro wikis, there's also a wealth of information on the Linux documentation site and the kernel newbies site. A lot of useful information is also present on Stack Overflow. I just wish that they hadn't shot themselves in the foot by alienating their contributors like this.

Other documentation sources like BSDs' are a bit more organized than that of Linux's, thanks to their strong emphasis on documentation. I wish Linux documentation was a more integrated single source, instead of being scattered around like this. It would have required more effort and discipline regarding documentation. Nevertheless, I guess that I should be grateful for these sources and the ability to leverage them. While I do rely on LLMs occasionally for solutions, I'm not very found of them because they're often very misguided, ill advised and lack the tiny bits of insight and wisdom that often accompany human generated documentation. It would be a disaster if the latter just faded into oblivion due to the over reliance on LLMs.

[skydhash]

I used to be in awe of the Arch Wiki, then I found the way FreeBSD and OpenBSD does documentation. I found that Arch Wiki mostly has trick and gotchas explanations, which is fine for a wiki. But sometimes I would prefer that Distros provide a centralized documentation about the base systems they provide.

[randomtoast]

I think part of the ArchWiki’s strength is that it treats documentation as first-class infrastructure. There is a shared expectation that if you solve something nontrivial, you upstream it into the wiki in a reasonably neutral, upstream-oriented way. That creates compounding returns over time. It also helps that Arch has a relatively coherent user base with similar assumptions about init systems, packaging, and defaults.

Many other distributions fragment their knowledge across mailing lists, forum posts, bug trackers, and random blog entries. That worked when search engines were good at surfacing niche technical content. With current search quality, especially the SEO noise layer, the absence of a canonical, well-curated wiki becomes very visible.