Very useful because the information is almost distribution agnostic as Arch will stick to upstream as much as possible; or at least that's my impression as Debian user reading their wiki.
Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo!
> Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo!
Exactly my thought! 20 years ago, I used Gentoo, and their wiki was the best. Somewhen the Arch wiki appeared and became better and better. At some point, I was tired of compiling for hours and switched one machine at a time to Arch, and today, the Arch wiki is the number one.
Interestingly enough, the ArchWiki itself seems to slowly be getting augmented by NixOS its wiki. Due to the way NixOS works, new packages constantly hit weird edge cases, which then requires deep diving into the package to write a workaround, the info of which either ends up in the wiki or the .nix package comments.
Arch and its wikin were already pretty good when it happened, but the real turning point was when the Gentoo wiki got hacked. After that, it never really recovered, and the Arch wiki must have absorbed a lot of that expertise because that's when it really took off.
as I recall anyway. can't believe it's been so long.
Gentoo's wiki is still great (& Arch's has been great for a long time), but yes, Arch's is probably improving at a faster rate. Arch is also a little more comprehensive when it comes to mainstream tech that's divergent like init & network management - Gentoo's still good here but openrc & netifrc show their influence throughout.
I get the sense the Arch wiki pages has more detail than the man pages themselves.
The wiki captures the knowledge that developers of said apps assume to be common, but don’t actually make sense unless you are bootstrapped into the paradigm.
Most man pages are written for someone who knows pretty precisely what they want to do, but don't recall which nobs to turn in the program to get that done. The Arch wiki instead focuses on someone who has a vague idea of what tools to use but doesn't know how those tools operate.
I've found that with an intermediate understanding, the Arch wiki is so much better that I often times won't even check the man pages. But on the occasions where I know the thing pretty well, they can be quite spotty, especially when it's a weird or niche tool among Arch users. So, depending on how you define "more detail", that might be an illusion.
Arch wiki is far better than most man pages. I've referred to Arch for my own non-Arch systems and when building Yocto systems. Most Arch info applies.
In the ancient days I used TLDP to learn about Linux stuff. Arch wiki is now the best doc. The actual shipped documentation on most Linux stuff is usually terrible.
GNU coreutils have man pages that are correct and list all the flags at least, but suffer from GNU jargonisms and usually a lack of any concise overview or example sections. Most man pages are a very short description of what the program does, and an alphabetic list of flags. For something as versatile and important as dd the description reads only "Copy a file, converting and formatting according to the operands" and there's not even one example of a full dd command given. Yes, you can figure it out from the man page, but it's like an 80s reference, not good documentation.
man pages for util-linux are my go-to example for bad documentation. Dense, require a lot of implicit knowledge of concepts, make references to 90s or 80s technology that are now neither relevant nor understandable to most users.
Plenty of other projects have typical documentation written by engineers for other engineers who already know this. man pipewire leaves you completely in the dark as to what the thing even does.
Credit to systemd, that documentation is actually comprehensive and useful.
Anecdotally the arch wiki expands on the vauge man pages, often with examples for cases actually used by people. And they are much more easily accessible to modify and have instant gratification of publishing changes. Publishing to upstream man pages of a project, need to wait for it to trickle down.
Man pages were always intended to be concise reference material, not tutorials or full docs. More akin to commented header files or a program's --help output, before the latter became common.
(GNU info tried to be a more comprehensive CLI documentation system but never fully caught on.)
man pages got replaced by --help in many, many cases.
GNU info was an interesting experiment but it got replaced by online wikis.
The Gentoo wiki was (is in many ways) phenomenal, and I recommend anyone interested in the inner workings of Linux at least walk through a full install from scratch - you learn a lot even just copying the instructions into the terminal.
> Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo!
It is, didn't Gentoo suffer some sort of data loss which made it lose its popularity?
Gentoo's source based approach was always destined to be less popular than a precompiled distro. Compile times & customization options select for a certain clientele.
All my machines still run Gentoo (I have used it for over 25 years). I just love the package manager. It has become much more low friction with the binary packages and gentoo-kernel(-bin). I regularly visit both the Gentoo and Arch documentation. They even cross reference each other and both are a great resource.
I think the reference was to Gentoo's wiki, which was indeed hacked and lost data iirc.
But yes, comparing distros themselves, Gentoo will not out compete streamlined and prepackaged distros in the broader adoption metrics.
The wikis themselves are largely distro agnostic and exceptionally useful for everyone on Linux though.
According to my experience, yes, it is. I have used Gentoo (using its wiki to install and configure), then after a few distro hops I was at Arch Linux and the wiki was a blessing and ever since I have found it (>10 years), I never needed anything else. Stuff they have on there applies specifically AND generally. Whereas Gentoo's wiki is usually specific IIRC.
> Also: isn't the Arch wiki the new Gentoo wiki? Because that was the wiki early 2000s and, again, I've never used Gentoo!
man came here to say the same.
used gentoo for all of 5 minutes in 2005 but the wiki was amazing and I referenced it repeatedly for other things.
generally heard the same about the arch wiki, too