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Discussion on: What's the best documentation you have ever read?

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bradtaniguchi profile image
Brad

Arch Linux wiki

When you have a distro that comes out of the box with basically nothing but a package manager, you need the wiki.
Need sound, read the wiki, need a UI, read the wiki. Ran into an error, read the wiki.

Few docs are written by those who have sloshed through pain and misery building your own Linux distro from the bottom up.

Hell, the wiki is a great resource for basically any Linux distro.

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madza profile image
Madza • Edited

Tbh I've always wanted to try Arch. It's challenging enough :)

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bradtaniguchi profile image
Brad

I tried it one time from the ground up on a raspberry pi. Great learning experience, but I wont ever do it again. I'm in the business of writing code, not fighting my operating system haha.

Today I use Manjaro, which builds ontop of Arch, but comes out of the box ready to use. Very stable, rolling releases, and Arches packages. Easy to get going, and easy to keep going. It is considered to be one of the best distros for development due to all the packages available, and straight forwardness of Manjaro, which keeps your from doing most of the manual stuff a straight Arch installation requires.

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ghost profile image
Ghost

take those appreciations with a grain of salt, is not that hard, you just need to follow the instructions. You'll hear similar comments on how hard Gentoo is, and the same thing, you just need to follow the instructions step by step. Years ago they where difficult but just because you would probably hit some HW compatibility problem while compiling your kernel or the dreaded Xorg config that didn't fitted your HW. But nowadays those problems are very, VERY rare. I haven't got a kernel panic after a kernel compilation in ages and now xorg configure itself.

Of course Arch and Gentoo users will say is very hard, because if not they lose nerd cred I guess. Of course if you are very new and you don't know what the kernel is, what is a init system is, a notion of partitions and bootloaders, you may need more reading but is not much more you need to know and everything else (including those are explained in the install instructions), I installed Gentoo many years ago after 2 months of using Linux, it was painful, but I enjoyed and learned a lot, very fast. :)

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madza profile image
Madza

I see your point.. What's your dist of choice now, btw?

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ghost profile image
Ghost

Gentoo, after many years and a lot of distrohop, I ended with my 2nd distro (my fist was Mandrake).

I used Arch for a few years, I still have it in some of my ARM boards, is great, their community I didn't like, but AUR is awesome and the wiki exceptional. But at some point the Gentoo call was too strong, so here I'm.

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vimturtle profile image
vimturtle

Hell, the wiki is a great resource for basically any Linux distro.

I think the Gentoo Wiki also qualifies to be in that list.

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bdwakefield profile image
Benjamin D Wakefield

I haven't spent time with either in years; but Gentoo has to be better right? It was super solid.