[arch-general] What happened to the Beginner's Guide?

[Sylvain Pascou]

On jeu., 2016-09-22 at 10:36 +0200, Tinu Weber wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 09:46:30 +0200, Alessio 'Blaster' Biancalana
> wrote:
> > 
> > While I agree with the guys saying the Beginner's Guide was harmful
> > to the
> > distro making lazy noobish users choose the wrong distribution for
> > 'em, I
> > strongly think that the Guide was pretty helpful as a quick setup
> > checklist
> > to seniors too.
> 
> Honestly, the Installation Guide does a tremendously better job at
> acting as a "checklist" than the old Beginners' Guide, which was
> filled
> with lots of additional noise concerning (arbitrarly chosen) special
> cases.
> 
> Just take a look at that beautifully concise "Contents" table on
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_guide.
> That's one perfect checklist :-)
> 
> More seriousyl, I think it's a healthy approach to first give an
> overview of what is required for the installation, and then let the
> user/newcomer search the information in the wiki on their own (rather
> than giving them one big chunk where they miss the forest for the
> trees).


Even though the Installation Guide does not detail every operation, 1/4
words are links to other pages, which contain these informations.
There's no deep search to conduct individually; everything is linked on
the Installation Guide.
ArchLinux is all about the user shaping his own system, whether
begginer or experimented. By forking to the related page of every
service to setup, with installation procedures, alternatives and
troubleshooting, it allows for proper customization and education.

Personally, being a newcomer to Arch (not to Linux though), I found it
more useful than an overloaded Begginer's Guide. It is tougher to
setup, but it properly follows Arch's philosophy, and acts both as an
introduction for newcomers and a checklist for experienced users.