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Comment by mnd999 | Hacker News Reader

As someone who’s done the same (although I’m still using FreeBSD on my NAS) I missed decent documentation the most. I felt most at home on Arch because the wiki is pretty decent.

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The man pages on FreeBSD are a lot better than on Linux. And you can read them without network and/or browser.

The Arch Wiki is alright if you run Arch, but I definitely prefer well-written and fully up-to-date manpages from the offset. For starters, it doesn't require me to open a web browser first; it also doesn't depend on me having network connectivity at any particular time.

My take is definitely different from GP: I find FreeBSD to have a much better documentation story compared to Linux (even Arch).

> The Arch Wiki is alright if you run Arch

No, it's pretty broadly useful; I've used it on at least Ubuntu, Fedora, and centos. It helps that Arch is pretty close to upstream, so docs are usually pretty generic.

I can't disagree about offline docs and the extraordinary quality of BSD manpages, though:)

Yeah I see Arch Wiki as Linux Wiki when I’m using Ubuntu.(and Ask Ubuntu as Ask Linux)

I've even used the arch wiki when setting up stuff on FreeBSD, because it covers a whole lot of 3rd party software - some of which runs on FreeBSD as well.

A lot better than other BSDs as well (although I much prefer reading the NetBSD code).

Admittedly, I can’t speak to how it compares to OpenBSD docs as I’ve never really bothered with OpenBSD

DragonflyBSD is cool, but documentation is rough and a lot of it seems to be from old FreeBSD components modified for its speciality. I will say the primary developer is an exceptionally nice person who’s helped me a time or two on the irc.

You can read the Arch Linux wiki without a network and a graphical browser too, just:

    pacman -S arch-wiki-docs elinks
    elinks /usr/share/doc/arch-wiki/html/en/Main_page.html

> without a network

> pacman -S arch-wiki-docs elinks

does pacman install docs and elinks without network?

interesting

I am sure OP meant to run this once when you have an internet connection after which you will be able to view the docs offline.

I'm sure you understood what I meant, but if you want to be literal, then yes: you can also install packages with pacman while offline, if you have downloaded the packages first.

This command downloads the packages without installing them:

    pacman -Sw elinks arch-wiki-docs

I wonder why this doesn't work on Manjaro.

Because Manjaro is a different Linux distribution from Arch Linux, and have a different selection of packages.

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