Examples could be things like specific configuration defaults or general decision-making in leadership.
What would you change?
I still don’t know the technical details between zram and zswap but I feel like fedora should switch to zswap and support hibernation out the box
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I’d say updated documentation, there are some articles in their wiki/documentation that don’t consider the default configuration for openSUSE, but an old one I think.
NixOS
I love NixOS, but the documentation is terrible. Better documentation would go a long way to making it a more user-friendly platform.
I think the biggest flaw in Arch is the “keyring” package that can go out of date between updates. EndeavourOS makes it worse since it has two of them.
EndeavourOS ships eos-update that somewhat fixes this and can be used in place of pacman or yay. It always updates the keyring first. How many people use that utility though ( or even know it exists ).
Pacman and yay should “just work”.
It’s fixed by now I think ; I never update between projects, so sometimes would go a few months between updates and it hasn’t happen anymore. When it did, the fix was simple enough while still annoying of course.
AFAIK now the keyring gets updated first if needed. In the middle of something here, can’t try unfortunately - but at the time of the issue, while the first-level answer was “Update All The Things (all the time)”, the problem was on the table, and acknowledged as in need of a fix.
I’d love yearly Debian releases instead of just every 2 years.
Arch, literally nothing, everything i didnt like i changed myself. Now i have the perfect user experience
Desktop environment should be separated from the OS. You should be able to change the de easily. Maybe in a container.
Present the user with common software when installing the os. Ask the user if she wants to install any of it (as a flatpak).
Ask for prioprietary codecs and install them if wanted.
It is. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You can go ahead and apt-get xfce on Linux Mint right now. Back in 1998, I had Window Maker, Gnome and some other windows 95 inspired DE all installed in my Conectiva Linux. It was always possible.
I frequently do this to try out different DEs. My only issue with it is that if the DE has its own version of some package like a music player I end up with a cluttered menu with all version from all installed DEs. Would be nice if there were an easy way to limit each DE to its app list by default.
By default is a tall order. Most people want to have full access to their software library. But a GUI tool to edit the menu for a specific DE for a specific user…that would be nice.
It does not? It’s what I did on pop os and it’s working fine.
I haven’t installed KDE in a long time. But installing both Gnome and Window Maker next to Mint’s Cinnamon was absolutely breezy.
I don’t get this. It is a common statement on lemmy especially among the new users. I have been daily-driving linux for many many years, and every install of a new distro gets 3 or 4 DEs added to play around with and find the ‘flavour of the year’ for myself.
I don’t recall this ever being a real problem. Ever.
Been using Linux for 25 years, and I remember some of this from init script years, but it’s been a long, long time since it’s been an issue in any half-way decent distro.
I started with Conectiva in the nineties. Back on Gnome 1, fvwm, etc. Never experienced that. The opposite, it was always possible to run programs from one toolkit in another. The only issue was the aesthetic clash.
Present the user with common software
Manjaro does this with word processing software but I wish it did it with more stuff. It would be nice to not have to uninstall a bunch of apps and install my preferred ones as the first step after a fresh install
Exactly
That’s plain wrong.
Like so much of the Linux stuff that’s thrown around in here. It’s frustrating.
I’ve done this with debian in the past, you just install different DE in parallel. Works well enough, don’t remember it causing any issues. It just makes a mess of your home folder, so I don’t do it outside of testing purposes.
I guess with immutable linux distros, it would be possible, as fat as I understand.
NixOS
Mostly perfect in my opinion but it’d be nice if when they renamed options they didn’t deprecate the old option names so old configs still worked
Fedora
- not made in the US so their images can ship nonfree drivers and codecs
- thus they had ARM images for Atomic variants!
- flathub instead of fedora flatpaks
- KDE first instead of GNOME (GNOME is okay and very nice in many parts, but absurdly lacking in others)
I like the rest. It would be cool if they could adopt musl like Alpine, glibc is a mess and you basically need to compile every software against musl manually to use it on Fedora.
Apart from that, best Distro ever.
LinuxMint
- Stop crashing when I log in after standby
- Weird graphical glitches
- The WiFi manager. Trying to connect to work WiFi but I then have to fill in info on certificates, protocols and what not. Stuff I don’t understand, don’t experience on Mac/windows and don’t want to know about.
- At least try to make an interesting package manager/store. How about some screenshots and icons?
I’d have Ubuntu stop forcing me to use Snaps.
Maybe you should switch your favourite then?
The enshittification of Ubuntu will not stop on an enforced Appstore.
There where Times when Ubuntu was Marks baby, but nowadays with pro, advertisement and tracking in the terminal an AppStore, everything has to have a businesscase.
I would recommend just plain Debian either with flatpak or in the testing branch. It’s almost the same, stable as a rock and driven by a community.
Somewhat but it is a rolling release. Packages will be major-updated constantly.
Yes it runs quite stable. But the packages and their configuration can change.
If you’re looking for something more conservative, the stable branch fits better but on a desktop it’s very old (like an Ubuntu lts)
The common recommendation is Linux Mint, but there are lots of Ubuntu derivatives out there. Another common recommendation is Debian or a Debian derivative, and those will generally be similar to Ubuntu since Debian is the upstream of Ubuntu.
You can feel free to ignore it if you aren’t open to other options, but my personal distro recommendation for a Gnome-based desktop is Fedora. It has a much quicker update cycle, so you’ll actually get feature updates on your packages (which is great if you use neovim plugins, since the neovim packages in the Ubuntu repos are ancient at this point, or you know, any other package that benefits from being updated). Of course it obviously isn’t as bleeding edge as Arch, though I personally see that as a benefit because I found Arch to be unstable (haven’t really experienced any instability with Fedora in the past few years though). But don’t be mistaken, I’m not saying Fedora is similar to Ubuntu, just providing an alternative perspective since you seem to be open to switching to a different distro (though the differences may be more minor than you think from an end-user perspective).
BTW, Linux Mint isn’t just a “beginner distro”, it’s perfectly fine for anyone to use, and it fixes a lot of the Canonical BS from Ubuntu. I feel like some people get caught up in the thought that Mint is the distro that you ditch for another one when you become more comfortable with Linux, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
Going upstream to Debian
For Fedora, replace the current installer (Anaconda) with the openSUSE Tumbleweed installer.
One of the aspects I love about the openSUSE TW installer is the ability to remove groups of packages for the initial install. This is particularly useful if you never use certain programs or intend to replace them with the Flatpak version.
I would have Debian go back in time to 1999 and adopt Window Maker as it’s default DE. GNUstep would be integrated and made cross platform. All popular software on windows, Mac and Linux would be based off of it. We’d be used to lightning fast, beautiful DE, with an auto docking paradigm. World peace and the end of hunger would be achieved.
Wouldn’t you have to get GNUstep working first? That seems like a limiting factor in your otherwise admirable plan.
macOS and Linux could indeed have had a common Desktop API. GNUstep was started even before Cacoa and could have kept compatibility with it.
The other problem is that no GNUstep desktop environment ever really got off the ground either. WindowMaker ( really just a window manager, not a DE ) is not written in GNUstep. I imagine it is written in C against the X11 libs.
I like your dream though. I used to dream of the same.
I am pretty sure that GNUstep is cross platform though. At least we have that.
Have you seen NextSpace?
You forgot world peace and hunger.
It’s a pie in the sky by definition. It was the *Step paradigm I had fallen in love with. Very elegant. Mail.app was cool. It’s not the paradigm the industry adopted, in the end. MDI and Taskbar won for better or worse. Just look at the upheaval that Gnome caused by abandoning it, the sheer number of forks.
I miss my Window Maker that came rizzed up to nines by default on Conectiva. It made my 486 fast, elegant, and futuristic. I could listen to MP3, chat on IRC, and have a page open on Netscape all at the same time!
BTW GNUstep is alive. I’ll check out NextSpace, thanks for pointing me there!
