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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

> However, when installing Arch, I resolved each installation error with the help of the wiki

The Arch wiki is amazing even if you're not running Arch at all. In 25+ years of using Linux I've never used Arch and yet the Arch wiki is really a treasure trove. I regularly use it even though I'm running Debian (and Devuan too).

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Yep, I use Arch Wiki as a starting point even for NixOS issues, when they're not strictly Nix-specific. Before then, Gentoo wiki was the go-to, but Arch Wiki has surpassed it by this point.

I also think that the AUR is a great source of information too, since PKGBUILDs are really easy to understand and useful for determining how a program can be built and packaged, and you can go and use this to make other kinds of packages for a given program.

Yes, once you get to the competence level of being able to map over information from the arch wiki or GitHub issues your experience becomes a lot smoother.

Yes! Gentoo was my first Linux distro, and I am grateful for the wiki. It made my hard ride with Linux — it’s been 15 years now — highly enjoyable

Same. I'm hoping the push the Nix documentation team is pushing right now sets the path to something like the Arch wiki for NixOS.

So, basically like the Guix docs then

The Guix actually docs look like the current Nix docs, which I presume is not a coincidence given the nature of Guix. These are not bad docs by any means, but the Arch wiki is a wealth of documentation that goes far beyond the norms, documenting all sorts of things that are not part of the base system, including quirks with specific hardware and software. There's nothing wrong with the docs Nix and Guix have today, they're just not really the same thing as Arch Wiki. NixOS has an unofficial wiki, which is a bit more apples-to-apples, but it's relatively bare for now.

That having been said, I think I'd have a bit of trouble adopting the Guix system though, because I rely pretty heavily on the NixOS options search, and it seems Guix at this moment only has a package search.

You can also search system services / facilities:

    guix system search ...

Arch’s docs make me simultaneously happy and sad: happy because they’re AMAZING even for the most obscure things I’ve run into… sad because they’ve given me a taste of what docs could be but aren’t.

In many cases that should be taken as a plea that you get involved and write those documentations. Writing documentation is hard, but someone needs to do it.

I think it is because it documents the individual contributions to linux, which all coexist in the Arch distribution.

Since arch doesn't generally make choices for you, the wiki IS sort of the choose-your-own-adventure installer.

Other distributions have made the choices, but they are documented in the wiki.

You mean the Debian wiki is bad or useless ?

I think Arch and Gentoo are generally considered closer to upstream. So, it is less likely that you are getting os-specific advice on their wikis.

Worth noting that part of the reason the Arch wiki is more effective than the Debian wiki is that the former only deals with a single version of things, "current", whereas the Debian wiki has to address multiple releases. This makes it more difficult to prune old information or to have a concise narrative, among other effects.

I think it might be that the software in arch and the "wordware" of the arch wiki are both in sync with reality/rolling release

Gentoo as well.

YES!

The arch wiki is amazing!

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