Exactly my thought! 20 years ago, I used Gentoo, and their wiki was the best. Somewhen the Arch wiki appeared and became better and better. At some point, I was tired of compiling for hours and switched one machine at a time to Arch, and today, the Arch wiki is the number one.
as I recall anyway. can't believe it's been so long.
The wiki captures the knowledge that developers of said apps assume to be common, but don’t actually make sense unless you are bootstrapped into the paradigm.
I've found that with an intermediate understanding, the Arch wiki is so much better that I often times won't even check the man pages. But on the occasions where I know the thing pretty well, they can be quite spotty, especially when it's a weird or niche tool among Arch users. So, depending on how you define "more detail", that might be an illusion.
In the ancient days I used TLDP to learn about Linux stuff. Arch wiki is now the best doc. The actual shipped documentation on most Linux stuff is usually terrible.
GNU coreutils have man pages that are correct and list all the flags at least, but suffer from GNU jargonisms and usually a lack of any concise overview or example sections. Most man pages are a very short description of what the program does, and an alphabetic list of flags. For something as versatile and important as dd the description reads only "Copy a file, converting and formatting according to the operands" and there's not even one example of a full dd command given. Yes, you can figure it out from the man page, but it's like an 80s reference, not good documentation.
man pages for util-linux are my go-to example for bad documentation. Dense, require a lot of implicit knowledge of concepts, make references to 90s or 80s technology that are now neither relevant nor understandable to most users.
Plenty of other projects have typical documentation written by engineers for other engineers who already know this. man pipewire leaves you completely in the dark as to what the thing even does.
Credit to systemd, that documentation is actually comprehensive and useful.
(GNU info tried to be a more comprehensive CLI documentation system but never fully caught on.)
GNU info was an interesting experiment but it got replaced by online wikis.
It is, didn't Gentoo suffer some sort of data loss which made it lose its popularity?
But yes, comparing distros themselves, Gentoo will not out compete streamlined and prepackaged distros in the broader adoption metrics.
The wikis themselves are largely distro agnostic and exceptionally useful for everyone on Linux though.
man came here to say the same.
used gentoo for all of 5 minutes in 2005 but the wiki was amazing and I referenced it repeatedly for other things.
generally heard the same about the arch wiki, too