Examples could be things like specific configuration defaults or general decision-making in leadership.
What would you change?
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.
honestly canonical has always been like this.
what do you suggest for an alternative thats similar to ubuntu?
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.
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
Like Ninite for Windows but at the start not manually downloaded
Exactly
I guess with immutable linux distros, it would be possible, as fat as I understand.
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.
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.
Installing KDE Plasma on a Gnome installation breaks so much shit it’s not funny, but most of this seems to be a problem with the command line because doing it with YAST seems to prevent things from breaking.
It does not? It’s what I did on pop os and it’s working fine.
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.
Roughly the same here. And yeah this hasn’t been a problem since the very first years. And even then it was just some config tweaks.
Arch should have the same zsh profile you have on the live image, installed after the installation by default.
Some defaults I would like to see:
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Have zsh as the interactive shell (And also have its dotfiles in a better location like XDG_CONFIG_HOME/zsh)
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Btrfs with compression enabled and subvolumes set. (Maybe also timeshift installed, not sure because not everyone uses timeshift for btrfs snapshots).
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ZRAM (With proper sysctl.conf like PopOS does).
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Pacman as the package manager with an Aur helper already installed.
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No bloat™ preinstalled, nothing of shipping flatpak or snap by default or even a DE. So I can just boot into a tty without having to do the minimal install from zero.
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Comply with the FHS and XDG specs (Arch fucking installs packages to /opt and doesnt set ~/.local/bin as part of PATH)
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Dont break userspace (arch did this recently with an update to glibc that removed a patch that breaks steam games)
Edit: Also forgot to mention:
- Ship x86-64 v3 binaries, common arch, even Gentoo is doing it while on arch you have to use non official repos.
Btrfs with compression enabled and subvolumes set.
And enable/automate maintenance services for BTRFS. For example:
balaceshould be run on heavily used system disks orscrubcould help detect errors even on single disks.ZRAM (With proper sysctl.conf like PopOS does).
Could you explain the preference of ZRAM over ZSWAP? I thought the latter was the more advanced and better performing solution. Is there some magic in Pop’s config?
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Remove snaps
Debian
- Say the current stable and testing version number and name clearly on the web front page. Actually put it on every single page instead of burying it somewhere. It takes no space at all and is stupidly hard to find of you’re ootl.
- Nicer installer. Make sure images with WiFi drivers and firmware are easy to find.
Also I wish every distribution had a wiki as nice as Arch’s.
If I might add something: We could turn something like testing or unstable into a proper rolling release for desktop machines. It works reasonably well for that. However it is completely unsupported and would require some change to the release model and manpower dedicated to it.
Debian + nix unstable and you get the best of both worlds. Bleeding edge userland, and the system always boots^btw
You know you can just write: stable or testing on your /etc/apt/sources.list repository config, instead of the distro codename, don’t you?
It would be cool if it officially brought back KDE Plasma.
(Linux Mint)I’m using plasma on LMDE, are you telling me they don’t officially support it?
They won’t answer questions about KDE specifically on their official Discord. Not that it matters.
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.
I wish Debian picks KDE instead of GNOME as their default DE on the instalation menu. GNOME is so ill-fitted for point release due to its bleeding-edge nature. It works well with Fedora because the distro itself is bleeding-edge (same goes with Arch & Nix).
Fedora:
- Put H264 and H265 hardware video decoding back in
- Make Flathub the default Flatpak repository
- Make the installer easier for beginners by hiding advanced settings most won’t need
- Make their KDE spin more prominent, currently you have to look for it to find it
No snaps or flatpak by default.
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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.
The documentation. It needs more of it.
the distro
It’s NixOS, the docs could be better, had a lot of confusion and had to watch a lot of tutorials when getting started, when I should’ve been able to just read the documentation instead.
Imagine NixOS with arch level’s wiki.
I for one love the NixOS concept, but I can’t phantom myself to learn it with such poor docs.
I love the concept so much that I even tried to replicate it with arch and ansible. No need to tell how that went. . .
Linux Mint - More up to date packages. Especially the kernel.
They now have a mint “edge” iso that has a significantly newer kernel!
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Mint used to be based on the newest versions of Ubuntu.
They only use the LTS as a base now to make development easier. That’s why everything is older.
This probably doesn’t add anything to the conversation, but your comment reminded me of this change a few years ago.
Like u/lukmyly013 said, I’d love an official KDE version to mint. It isn’t that hard to get going, and I like cinnamon well enough on most things, but there are a few situations where I’d like to have plasma out of the box
They had a KDE version for a while. Ended up dropping it since all of their in-house tools and stuff were GTK.
Now they only have 3 GTK DE options.
