Re:I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
by goku12 on Sunday February 15, 2026 @04:03AM
(#47022200)
I'm on Gentoo without the precompiled packages, except for very large applications. Gentoo wiki is not a match for Arch wiki for its sheer content and organization. But Gentoo wiki contains some stuff that Arch wiki doesn't. For example, what kernel features are needed for a certain application and functionality, and how a setup differs between systemd and other inits. I find both wikis quite informative in combination.
Re:I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
by ofalkaed on Sunday February 15, 2026 @03:28AM
(#47022019)
Arch was young in those days but I think fairly well known? we were quite vocal, opinionated and interjecting our views everywhere by the time of the Xfree86/Xorg switch. Perhaps it is just my view from being a part of it but I remember encountering the Arch reputation everywhere I went. Or maybe it is just the nostalgia influencing me.
Re:I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
by VorpalWay on Sunday February 15, 2026 @03:38AM
(#47022061)
Could be. I don't remember Arch being on my radar at that point though. But it wasn't long after I switched from Gentoo to Arch (and then Debian for a decade due to lack of stability before going back to Arch 7 years ago or so).
A few years before the Xorg thing there was also the 2.4 to 2.6 kernel switchover. I think I maybe was using Slackware at that point, and I remember building my own kernel to try out the new shiny thing. You also had to update some userspace packages if I remember correctly: things like modprobe/insmod at the very least.
Re:I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
by ofalkaed on Sunday February 15, 2026 @03:57AM
(#47022166)
2.6 was also the switch from OSS to Alsa, which caused some fun, Alsa really was not ready for prime time.
Re:I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
by VorpalWay on Sunday February 15, 2026 @04:12AM
(#47022259)
Oh yeah, you just unlocked a forgotten memory. I was actually lucky there, I had a SoundBlaster Live 5.1 which worked just fine on ALSA (hardware mixing even worked out of the box). But I remember lots of other people complaining on IRC about it.
Re:I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers
by doubled112 on Monday February 16, 2026 @07:19PM
(#47042089)
And once ALSA was working pretty well for me, PulseAudio came too soon.
I was using Gentoo at the time, which meant recompiling the world (in the first case) or everything GUI (in the second case). With a strict order of operations to not brick your system. Back then, before Arch existed (or at least before it was well known), the Gentoo wiki was known to be a really good resource. At some point it languished and the Arch wiki became the goto.
(I haven't used Gentoo in well over a decade at this point, but the Arch wiki is useful regardless of when I'm using Arch at home or when I'm using other distros at work.)