Why can’t the installation create aliases like

flatpak run jellyfin-media-player ? And then highlight conflicts during?

It’d be dangerous if an installed app claimed to be something like sudo or bash. Even if a mechanism was created for flatpak apps to claim a single shell command, there is no centralized authority on all flatpak apps to vet them. If there was for flathub, and each uploaded package was checked, that still leaves every other non-flathub flatpak repo which must implement the same vetting. Because there’s no way to guarantee to do it safely, and because flatpak devs are unwilling to compromise, this is just what we get.

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/1188

This is extremely simple to fix with scripts that can be automatically created on install time. Here is a quick script I just wrote. It will search for first matching app and run it. Just save the script as flatrun, give it executable bit and put it into $PATH. Run it as like this: flatrun freetube

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# flatrun e
# flatrun freetube

if [ "${#}" -eq 0 ]; then
	flatpak list --app --columns=name,application
else
	app="$(
		flatpak list --app --columns=name,application |
			grep -i -F "${@}" |
			awk -F'\t' '{print $2}'
	)"

	if [ -z "${app}" ]; then
		flatpak list --app --columns=name,application
	elif [[ "$(echo "${app}" | wc -l)" -gt 1 ]]; then
		echo "${app}"
	else
		flatpak run "${app}"
	fi
fi

Edit: Just updated the script to output the list of matching apps, if it matches more than one.

flatpak run com.github.iwalton3.jellyfin-media-player

You can use /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/com.github.iwalton3.jellyfin-media-player instead. and then create aliases or symlinks (for example in ~/bin/) for that.

Even Arch Linux could learn from the Arch Wiki.

The Debian Wiki would actually like a word.

There is stuff in there that’s not found anywhere else. For example while researching driverless printing recently I found a huge page on the Debian Wiki but the Arch wiki only has a paragraph saying supporting printers should be detected automatically.

Who made the Arch Wiki? Was it done by the community? Genuine question.

Fedora’s installer is abysmal.

I thought so too. It doesn’t have enough options for power users and too many for newcomers. It caters to a middleground that barely exists.

Enabling access to proprietary software should also install audio/video codecs.

The codecs are also the #1 thing that annoy me in Fedora. Because of shitty US patent laws the rest of the world has to suffer.

Fortunately many flatpak browser now comes with codecs, like ungoogled chromium and librewolf.

Why won’t they just use Calamares?

The installer is the single one reason I can’t switch to fedora. I have several drives in my machine and I like to separate them, but their installer scares the shit out of me. I can pull it off for sure, but I just don’t want to take the risk

honestly I wished the arch wiki turned into a distro agnostic wiki. i have been using debian for decades and use arch wiki all the time but it would be nice to have a one stop shop for linux documentation. the Wikipedia of Linux run as a coalition.

Seconded. NixOS’s documentation has consistently been the worst I’ve read, always forcing me to go to the source code to try and understand what in the world is happening. It makes quick changes to new things nigh impossible. I had to resort to taking notes when I understood things about nix in order to retain the knowledge or at least link to where I could easily regain it.

The nixos wiki was marginally better and https://nixlang.wiki/ has been better. However the latter is less known so has less content. All in all, nix documentation is still bad.

Most distros could also learn from Arch and create something similar to the AUR.

i’ve seen Void’s xbps-src tool compared to the AUR multiple times in /r/voidlinux (and i guess it’s like a decentralized AUR?? you can build+install pkgs from source using the package manager, sure, but there’s no one big diy xbps packages registry like aur.archlinux.org for Void) and while i don’t really see it, if you follow that train of thought, void’s pretty set in the “right direction” :D

The Debian Wiki is so much better than the Arch one.

And know how to use an existing btrfs partition. And always [at least have an option to] show exactly what the automatic installer is going to do before I run anything. There’s gotta be a middle ground between “we’ll just surprise you” and “here, do everything yourself”.

It’s difficult to find where to even download the thing, particularly if you’re looking for older versions

Definitely still has that directory web page feel surprised there isn’t a visitor counter at the bottom

I love the look of the Debian website.

What’s wrong with it?

Maybe you would like Void or Chimera

Gentoo and Arch do have easy installers (Arch via the Arch install script, Gentoo… Well, they provide stage 3 already built, a genkernel option, and even binary distribution now, which greatly simplifies the process)

Would it detract from Debian if it had an installer which was more intuitive to new users? As long as they don’t remove the options to configure, I see no harm, only benefits. To me, the thing about Debian is that it’s a community. If a distro wants to be elitistic, sure, that’s up to them, but I don’t see Debian having that goal.

Slackware needs to learn how to be hip like arch. I’m the baby in our irc group, and I’m 40. All the cool kids are using arch BTW.

Slackware is broken, though.

• Its releases are so far apart that the default installer stops working in between releases cause it can’t handle the changes to the repos.
• Its default software selection is outdated, makes no sense (multiple tools for the same task), and is grouped illogically. If I want to run Xfce, I shouldn’t have to install the KDE group to satisfy necessary dependencies. If I install the base group, all dependencies for using the package manager should be satisified. And Libreoffice shouldn’t be installable only via an unofficial, unsupported third party repo.
• Its documentation is so outdated it isn’t useful anymore:
  https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:slackware_admin:installing_on_uefi_hardware

“Some modern computers have started to offer motherboards that use Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) as a replacement for the traditional BIOS.”