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.
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.
A not insignificant portion of resources at access.redhat.com are locked down behind the RH subscription paywall. It’s fairly trivial however to just obtain a free RH subscription via the RH Developer program:
It's a bit of split as to how Red Hat considers the term "documentation". The actual product docs are free to access while the Knowledge Base, which is considered a value-add for customers, does have a lot of its content (usually troubleshooting or specific instructions/guides) behind either a Red Hat login or needing an active subscription. For which, as you mentioned, the Developer Subscription for Individuals qualifies.
Ever since the systemd thing, I can’t get it to work. :-(
Devuan is OK, though apt-get upgrade broke grub on one of my machines.
I settled on manjaro. I kind of hate it, but at least it sort of works. In particular, I have it on a shared desktop, and “switch user” works.
It took 3-4 hours to get xscreensaver to work (poorly) with multiple sessions. There’s no way to save games in micropolis (open source simcity) because it is a flatpack. I frequently reboot because PulseAudio is still terrible.
Proton supposedly runs steam games on freebsd these days. Maybe that’s worth a spin.
If you're willing to run Manjaro (which uses systemd), any opposition to running e.g. Fedora with GNOME? I'd guess multi-session would function fine with GNOME on GDM, and pulseaudio has been replaced by pipewire. Although you could also use pipewire in Manjaro...
> Proton supposedly runs steam games on freebsd these days. Maybe that’s worth a spin.
Via running a Linux userland with syscall emulation. Since the GUI and user session stuff in FBSD is mostly the same as Linux (DRM/KMS for graphics, libinput and the xf86 DDX drivers, logind/ConsoleKit for session tracking, D-Bus for IPC) so I don't think this will address many grievances...
> I want Debian circa 2002 back.
Did display managers back then even support running multiple concurrent X servers on the same seat?
I never made the switch from Gnome 2 to 3; I switched to KDE instead. I use a redhat derivative at work, and it's a non-starter for me. RPM + yum is still a hot mess vs. dpkg.
I thought they were recompiling proton for freebsd (it is definitely open source), but I haven't looked carefully.
The "switch user" button is one feature. Whether or not Debian had it in 2002 isn't the point. The point is that what was supported was stable. That hasn't been my experience with it since the pulse audio disaster, and then the init wars.
I should look into switching to pipewire, but the only reason I'm using manjaro is that it mostly works out of the box. I'm not really interesting using a distro that makes me tinker with it to make my sound card (which has perfectly good drivers!) stable.
