Looking for volunteers to write application comparison articles

skottish · 2009-01-02 21:19:40

There are a number of "what's the best?", "easiest to configure", and "lightest", questions that come up frequently in the forums: Image viewer, PDF/document viewer, tiling window manager, floating window manager, desktop environment, text editor, IDE, web browser, terminal emulator, ETC. And while there's very good documentation on some of the individual pieces in the wiki, there isn't as much on comparisons between them.

In order to help keep the forums from an endless cycle of repetition, we're looking for volunteers to add some application comparison articles to the wiki. The entries don't need to be comprehensive on individual programs, and there should be every attempt made to not unnecessarily duplicate what's already been written. Basic information on things like keyboard friendliness, lightness, text and/or graphic mode, and the like is encouraged though.

We'd like to use this page as the starting point:

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Common_Apps

Don't use it for the comparisons themselves, but put a link to the articles under the correct category. The page is already good as it is, although it needs both more entries and to be linked to in the Archwiki Table of Contents for higher visibility (please).

Of course the articles are not for flame wars or opinions. It's a place where users can go to get a good general view of how apps stack up against each other.

Report back any progress made here.

SamC · 2009-01-02 21:38:28

So would there be an article for each of those headings, comparing all of the apps below it?

weasel8 · 2009-01-02 21:41:04

Ooh, I love this sort of thing! I'll try to help the best that I can.

skottish · 2009-01-02 22:35:00

SamC wrote:

So would there be an article for each of those headings, comparing all of the apps below it?

That'll work. As long they are linked to to a central page, it will give all of us an easy way to find information.

weasel8 wrote:

Ooh, I love this sort of thing! I'll try to help the best that I can.

Excellent. I look forward to seeing your work.

weasel8 · 2009-01-02 23:04:02

Cool. So do you want links like wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Common_Apps/Media, for example?

SamC · 2009-01-02 23:14:40

Or perhaps wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Common_Apps/Comparison_of_Media_Applications? (Which is far too long)

Edit: I'll get started comparing the tiling WM's now, locally, and put them in the correct place later.

Last edited by SamC (2009-01-02 23:23:44)

weasel8 · 2009-01-02 23:23:57

SamC wrote:

Or perhaps wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Common_Apps/Comparison_of_Media_Applications? (Which is far too long)

I don't think so, as long as it's under the Common_Apps parent. I think it ought to be either
wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Common_Apps/Media
or
wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Comparison_of_Media_Applications
I favor the first, but it's up to skottish, I guess.

dolby · 2009-01-02 23:26:05

And symlink it to easylinux.info
Oh! Its down. That would explain why Archlinux needs a page like that.

skottish · 2009-01-02 23:38:31

As far as formatting goes, just something simple like Comparison of Text Editors. Comparison of Image Viewers. We don't want them to be over or under-specialized. Simply Media is too broad.

dolby wrote:

And symlink it to easylinux.info
Oh! Its down. That would explain why Archlinux needs a page like that.

Sure. We've jumped up hundreds of new, registered users in the last week. "What's the best" threads come up constantly. Instead jumping in to thread after thread and saying "this has been covered 50 times here", we can simply point people to the information. If the articles are well written and organized, the hope is that at least some people will go there first.

SamC · 2009-01-02 23:54:26

Note that some categories can't really be compared, such as "Utilities". If there were more of them, I would arrange them into proper sections, but there are only two.

Last edited by SamC (2009-01-02 23:54:59)

dolby · 2009-01-03 00:18:22

my 2 cents: Link to it from the Beginners Guide, and dont write about an application if you dont know what its really about,

OT: Anyone know if theres a way to filter wiki search results by language?

skottish · 2009-01-03 00:19:52

dolby wrote:

my 2 cents: Link to it from the Beginners Guide, and dont write about an application if you dont know what its really about

+1, +1

SamC · 2009-01-03 01:01:21

Are there any examples of how tables are formatted on our wiki? I've got one for tiling WM's, but it looks pretty bad.

weasel8 · 2009-01-03 04:16:36

SamC wrote:

Note that some categories can't really be compared, such as "Utilities". If there were more of them, I would arrange them into proper sections, but there are only two.

Yeah...I don't think the Utilities section needs its own article. It's not like people are asking, "Hmm, which is better for monitoring my memory usage, Conky or Yaourt?"

SamC · 2009-01-03 04:33:49

However, you might end up with "Conky vs dzen2 vs xmobar vs whatever", I suppose. And all the different pacman scripts could use some explanation.

weasel8 · 2009-01-03 04:43:39

SamC wrote:

However, you might end up with "Conky vs dzen2 vs xmobar vs whatever", I suppose. And all the different pacman scripts could use some explanation.

Yeah, I was just thinking of yaourt vs. other pacman frontends, but I've only ever used yaourt.

skottish · 2009-01-03 05:22:22

There's going to some gray areas, but most it falls into categories. For instance, having separate pages for IDE and text editors is probably silly. Vim is both a text editor and an IDE depending on how it's set up. So is Geany, SciTE, Texmaker, Emacs, ETC. Putting them all together makes sense.

The two categories of window managers (tiling and floating), as well as DE deserve their own pages. What do you do with E17 then? It's as much a DE as it is a WM. If ended up in the floating WM page, as well as the DE page, that'd be fine. And no, it's tiling module doesn't make it a tiling WM.

PDF viewers and document viewers should probably be lumped together because almost all document viewers can view PDF files. Image viewers should get their own page. Same with terminal emulators.

Stuff like GIMP, Inkscape, and Blender probably don't need a comparison page. Even though other stuff can duplicate parts of their functionality, they're pretty much special programs in the Linux world.

Xyne · 2009-01-03 05:22:41

There's not much of a "vs" when it comes to the pacman wrappers. They all do different things and the can all be used together (commonly yaourt around powerpill around pacman-color).

peets · 2009-01-03 18:15:21

The tiling WM comparison chart is quite good; congratulations.

xisal · 2009-01-03 18:32:07

Take a look into http://wiki.xfce.org/recommendedapps.

moljac024 · 2009-01-03 18:43:43

skottish wrote:

There's going to some gray areas, but most it falls into categories. For instance, having separate pages for IDE and text editors is probably silly. Vim is both a text editor and an IDE depending on how it's set up. So is Geany, SciTE, Texmaker, Emacs, ETC. Putting them all together makes sense.
The two categories of window managers (tiling and floating), as well as DE deserve their own pages. What do you do with E17 then? It's as much a DE as it is a WM. If ended up in the floating WM page, as well as the DE page, that'd be fine. And no, it's tiling module doesn't make it a tiling WM.
PDF viewers and document viewers should probably be lumped together because almost all document viewers can view PDF files. Image viewers should get their own page. Same with terminal emulators.
Stuff like GIMP, Inkscape, and Blender probably don't need a comparison page. Even though other stuff can duplicate parts of their functionality, they're pretty much special programs in the Linux world.

Why three pages for WM/DEs ? Put them all in one page, but separate tables or whatever.

skottish · 2009-01-03 19:17:37

moljac024 wrote:

Why three pages for WM/DEs ? Put them all in one page, but separate tables or whatever.

There's going to be a lot of redundancy in a page if people had to write whether a WM is tiling or floating. And, most people are looking for one or another, not both.

Sjoden · 2009-01-03 21:46:03

I've added some common file managers, a terminal, window manager, sound app, and did a little organization of the media and wm section. I'll add a bit on file (archiving/compression/decompression(xarchive, squeeze & p7zip). This was a great idea Skottish and it looks like it's turning into a very useful page/reference.

Zack

Last edited by Sjoden (2009-01-03 21:55:09)

skottish · 2009-01-04 05:56:23

Wow. Nice.

Misfit138 · 2009-01-04 14:19:15

Great idea!
Go Archwiki, go!

Arch Linux

#1 2009-01-02 21:19:40

Looking for volunteers to write application comparison articles

#2 2009-01-02 21:38:28

Re: Looking for volunteers to write application comparison articles

#3 2009-01-02 21:41:04

Re: Looking for volunteers to write application comparison articles

#4 2009-01-02 22:35:00

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#5 2009-01-02 23:04:02

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#6 2009-01-02 23:14:40

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#7 2009-01-02 23:23:57

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