What can I do for Arch Linux? | Hacker News Reader

What can I do for Arch Linux?

whatcanidofor.archlinux.org

191 pointsruph12334 comments

> Wiki housekeeping

> Help clean and maintain the ArchWiki

I'm always impressed by how useful and in depth the arch wiki is, sometimes it's the best resource (or has the best background information) even when having a problem with something in another distro

At some point that used to be the Gentoo wiki, until it died it 2008 without backups. I wonder if a big portion of the people that contributed moved on to arch.

I know that I would never contribute to a project that lost my previous work through gross negligence.

The Arch wiki is also sometimes useful when working in other OSes.

I daily drive FreeBSD, and the Arch wiki is still a valuable resource, though not as often as when I was using more Linux.

Whenever I have some weird problem with pipewire or wayland on fedora, I know that someone in the archlinux community has had it before me.

true that!

Coding is a dead link: https://whatcanidofor.archlinux.org/coding.

https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/neoasknot/-/tree/main... looks like it might be the implementation for the site. The likes of https://whatcanidofor.archlinux.org/coding/Rust do work.

You could alternatively (provided you have JS enabled), go to https://whatcanidofor.archlinux.org/coding/Rust and then click on "Coding" from the navbar (it will load the page using some JS single page trickery).

Seems to work when you go to that link via the homepage but fails to load when you use a direct link or refresh the page. It appends a / to the URL when you use the direct link, which I assume is what breaks it.

Ah. Badly-implemented isomorphic rendering, with client-side routing that works, but a server-side implementation that’s partially broken.

I disable JavaScript in general for a significantly better experience of the web, and didn’t suspect anything like this since everything else was working perfectly.

Incidentally, I strongly oppose the use of client-side rendering for pages like this (not CSR in all cases, but yes for a site like this). Barring the small matter of this one broken page, the result is fairly uniformly inferior to the no-JavaScript version: it has a heavier footprint, doesn’t work as well (some history interactions are a touch dodgy, no loading throbber, can’t interrupt navigation with Escape, &c.), and feels slower than fresh page loads anyway. It’s foolish, harmful complexity.

Seems to be working now

404 for me, too.

Kind of like in real life. Software development leads you to nowhere.

It’d be nice if they display how many options were under each section without you having to click it. There’s my contribution as UX designer.

That's your suggestion/feedback. Not a contribution. Make it happen. Make the change and submit a merge request. ;)

>Arch Linux is 84.9% reproducible

oh wow that seems pretty good for OS level complexity

Seemingly that low mostly because of [testing] (66.2%) and [community-testing] (62.2%), [core] is 96.2% reproducible, only 10 packages left! Seems to be the most difficult ones though:

> bash 5.1.016-3, glibc 2.36-7, linux 6.1.9.arch1-1, linux-docs 6.1.9.arch1-1, linux-headers 6.1.9.arch1-1, linux-lts 5.15.91-1, linux-lts-docs 5.15.91-1, linux-lts-headers 5.15.91-1, python 3.10.9-1, python-tests

From https://reproducible.archlinux.org/

I thought Debian had solved these issues for these packages? I wonder why Arch has not picked up that work and carried themselves across the finish line.

Comparing https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/archlinux/archlinux.ht... with https://tests.reproducible-builds.org/debian/reproducible.ht..., it seems Debian is further away from being 100% reproducible than Arch.

The opposite? 96% for debian bookworm seems much larger than 91% for arch. And that percentage for arch is only for 186 packages in core, but 32795 for debian.

This is a good way to get help from the community.

Interesting that there's no mention of giving money. I guess their hosting and other expenses are well covered?

You can read more on this here: https://archlinux.org/donate/

> Ask not what your Arch Linux can do for you – ask what you can do for your Arch Linux.

Joking aside, I wish I've known Arch many years ago in the university, where I could actually do more for Arch, than just using, and this page structure would be certainly helpful.

The wiki, including installation instructions, are atrocious. KISS: Keep it simple, stupid. Nobody has time to read 30,000 pages to install an OS. One page, numbered points, in order, with only the required info, and all the required info. If it requires searching somewhere else, then you did it wrong.

And forum/community responses such as "WHAT?! You didn't read paragraph 34543.532.3452 of page 342534 of the documentation, reachable by clicking through 300 links starting from paragraph 2343 of the instructions?! OMFG! I don't have time to respond to people who don't even read the wiki! Even though I spent ten minutes typing this reply, and I could have simply responded with one sentence which would have actually been helpful! No! I don't have time for that! Read the wiki! READ THE WIKI!" Seriously, those people are massive internerd losers.

Distro is obviously not for you. Maybe you'll find a better fit elsewhere.

Distro is not going to alienate its userbase to cater to you.

Don't take it so personally. My observation was about the numerous similar responses to queries posted on their forum. Not to me, as I won't deign to sully my feet in such a morass. But I did read many queries from newbies who received such responses.

It's a choice between asking intelligent questions[0], in this case emphasis in the section about RTFM[1], or getting commercial support.

A community can only survive by filtering out morons who can't reference documentation; it would be deserted otherwise. There's only so much crap unpaid volunteers are willing to put up with.

0. http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

1. http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#rtfm

Introspection.

The wiki's installation guide is not long at all. You might need to click a couple of links for details and that's it.

Arch now has an installer too, by the way.

They left out: "Berating people in the forums" 8-)

People get what they deserve. All joking aside, I find that mentality to be one of the things that helps people grow. Start using Arch, have a problem, run to the forum with a lower effort question/no troubleshooting or research and you’re going to have a bad time. My guess is that’s not going to happen again.

Wish you’d see it more in other places.

My contribution to Arch has become trying to convince people to go to NixOS lol

All that rock solid distribution, and mentoring, too?

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