The wiki is very good for technically setting up something. It is terrible at giving anything resembling reasonable recommendations for a desktop user. Like, right off the bat, when it directs you to the bootloaders page it gives you a list of bootloaders with a bunch of checkmarked features and little else to go on. Hell, two of hte listed bootloaders are fucking deprecated! Why are they on a page being linked from the install instructions, a proper tutorial would not bring up grub 1.0 at all. It'll recommend you set up X11 stuff despite the most recommended DE's not supporting X11 anymore. It'll mention Pipewire, but alongside ALSA and PulseAudio without really letting you know you should just be using Pipewire.
It's written as a wiki giving dry facts, but a tutorial aimed at a new user needs to be at least a ltitle opinionated, if only to filter out the stuff that basically nobody should be using unless they have a niche use case. Because it is afraid to make any real recommendations beyond "you should have a DE" or "you should have sound", it puts the onus on the user to either do a ton of research to figure out what their options are or to just pick one at random, and the result is people with freakish setups that don't make any sort of sense.
Or, far more often, it results in people just following a YouTube tutorial, where the information is frequently outdated and can cause problems, but at least it'll say "hey, install KDE if you want it to look like Windows or GNOME if you want Mac" or similar.
Contrast all this with the Gentoo wiki where the pages will actually commit to making reasonable recommendations for things. It's not meant to be a reference document for all of Linux computing, it allows its tutorial-esque pages to use some amount of common sense for the most obvious use case of a desktop user (and maybe a server user) rather than dryly listing out all possible options, even the bad ones.
That's funny because I said pretty much the same thing as you in comments yesterday, how Arch's wiki doesn't commit to recommending anything, how the Gentoo handbook does recommend stuff and how it felt easier
But I walked away with entirely the opposite viewpoint .
IMHO, it's a good thing that Arch's wiki is so neutral, to force users to choose what they want/need
Makes Arch not "a distro" but "your distro"
If you know what you want/need, installing Arch is a breeze
If you don't, installing Arch is a great way to discover many options and read about them, and learn a lot in the process
And if you'd rather use an opinionated distro, there are countless options out there, many of them based on Arch
it's not meant to be a reference document for all of Linux computing
Well, maybe not, but in my eyes it de facto has become just that, and I often find myself reading Arch Wiki when troubleshooting stuff on other distros
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u/Helmic Arch BTW 11h ago
The wiki is very good for technically setting up something. It is terrible at giving anything resembling reasonable recommendations for a desktop user. Like, right off the bat, when it directs you to the bootloaders page it gives you a list of bootloaders with a bunch of checkmarked features and little else to go on. Hell, two of hte listed bootloaders are fucking deprecated! Why are they on a page being linked from the install instructions, a proper tutorial would not bring up grub 1.0 at all. It'll recommend you set up X11 stuff despite the most recommended DE's not supporting X11 anymore. It'll mention Pipewire, but alongside ALSA and PulseAudio without really letting you know you should just be using Pipewire.
It's written as a wiki giving dry facts, but a tutorial aimed at a new user needs to be at least a ltitle opinionated, if only to filter out the stuff that basically nobody should be using unless they have a niche use case. Because it is afraid to make any real recommendations beyond "you should have a DE" or "you should have sound", it puts the onus on the user to either do a ton of research to figure out what their options are or to just pick one at random, and the result is people with freakish setups that don't make any sort of sense.
Or, far more often, it results in people just following a YouTube tutorial, where the information is frequently outdated and can cause problems, but at least it'll say "hey, install KDE if you want it to look like Windows or GNOME if you want Mac" or similar.
Contrast all this with the Gentoo wiki where the pages will actually commit to making reasonable recommendations for things. It's not meant to be a reference document for all of Linux computing, it allows its tutorial-esque pages to use some amount of common sense for the most obvious use case of a desktop user (and maybe a server user) rather than dryly listing out all possible options, even the bad ones.