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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

Maybe a long time ago this was true, but these days Arch has better documentation, IMO

First, you won't use arch on production servers. Second what you said is incorrect. Arch Wiki has info on a lot of topics, but mostly for desktop or casual server usecase and certain aspects are completely ignored. Arch's Wiki is excellent but its also about the quality of documentation and how its structured.

RHEL's docs are simply unparalleled in the Linux world. I only wish search was better, but if required I can download them and use my own search anyways.

> First, you won't use arch on production servers.

I don’t know, for a pet server this might not be as dumb an idea as it sounds (though without automatic updates, obviously). Perhaps with aconfmgr[1]?

I haven’t done it in anger, but over seven years of running Arch on a personal server I’ve had a total of three instances of breakage: upstream strongSwan systemd integration change[2] (when using a config format they’ve considered deprecated for years), upstream nftables parsing bug[3] (I knew in advance that nftables is for adventurous people), and upstream Kea config format change[4] (and, well, Kea really bloody sucks—suggestions for anything else that can do DHCPv6 PD welcome). All of those resulted in the relevant service failing to work at all and would’ve been caught by a reasonable staging environment. My (Arch) GNOME desktop broke much more frequently during that time.

[1] https://github.com/CyberShadow/aconfmgr

[2] https://wiki.strongswan.org/projects/strongswan/wiki/Changel..., first item

[3] https://git.netfilter.org/nftables/commit/?id=638af0ceb2b223...

[4] https://kb.isc.org/docs/en/upgrading-to-kea-16, third item

I think the down-votes are unjustified.

I guess nobody is seriously using Arch as a server OS in production. So this is kind of comparing apples to oranges, sure.

But Arch's documentation is indeed one of the best around!

I'm a die hard Debian user since forever but for the last years I don't even bother to try to find anything in the abysmally bad Debian docs. I go straight to the Arch wiki (or to the Gentoo one for even more in depth docu on internal aspects of Linux software).

Contrary to that I've almost never found anything of value in the RedHat docs (that wasn't RedHat specific).

If the Arch wiki would expand on some things that are more related to running servers in production it would be the Linux documentation.

The overall quality and general applicability of Arch's docu is already unparalleled, imho.

Reminder, to stay true to the trope: I'm not using Arch Linux (as such) for anything.

Do you run Arch Linux in production? How's it going?

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