I mentioned this on Twitter and it keeps showing up in my entries (eg), so I might as well say it explicitly: increasingly, the ArchLinux wiki is becoming one of my relatively highly trusted information sources, both for Linux specific information and also often for more general things like X. I don't yet search it first, but when it comes up in my web searches I'm more and more inclined to stop looking at anything else.

I like the ArchLinux wiki for two reasons. First, they have all sorts of information on all sorts of things, many of them kind of geeky and obscure, and the content is written for a fairly technical audience (and often includes specific commands that I can immediately use). Second, the information seems to be pretty solid and trustworthy, based both on reading about areas that I already know and using information from the wiki. I don't know exactly how ArchLinux has managed to wind up with such a good technical resource, but I imagine that it says something about the sort of users that it attracts (since, well, it takes users to build and maintain a wiki).

Of course, all of this makes me somewhat curious about ArchLinux itself; that it has a cool wiki suggests that it might be cool itself. Sadly I don't really have any machines that I'm looking to (re)install with alternate Linuxes any time soon, so I'm unlikely to do more than read about it (if that). Still, you never know. Maybe someday I'll get sufficiently disgruntled with all of the major alternatives.

(In theory I could install ArchLinux in a virtual machine. In practice I generally don't expect this to tell me anything interesting about an OS, and it suffers from the usual 'why am I doing this?' problem I have with just playing around with stuff in general. I've never been the kind of person who had installs of N different Linuxes sitting in partitions on their drive, just so they could play around with them.)