Examples could be things like specific configuration defaults or general decision-making in leadership.

What would you change?

    • sebsch@discuss.tchncs.de
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      10 months ago

      Maybe you should switch your favourite then?

      The enshittification of Ubuntu will not stop on an enforced Appstore.

      • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        honestly canonical has always been like this.

        what do you suggest for an alternative thats similar to ubuntu?

        • Para_lyzed@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          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.

        • sebsch@discuss.tchncs.de
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          10 months ago

          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.

          • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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            10 months ago

            if i understand correctly the testing branch is similar to ubuntu non-lts?

                • sebsch@discuss.tchncs.de
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                  10 months ago

                  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)

  • GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • pbjamm@beehaw.org
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        10 months ago

        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.

        • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
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          10 months ago

          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.

    • z00s@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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

    • bia@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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.

    • Petter1@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      I guess with immutable linux distros, it would be possible, as fat as I understand.

  • joojmachine@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    As someone who’s an active user and contributor to Fedora: words cannot express enough how much I hate US laws.

    It’s the reason we can’t ship with H.264 hardware decoding out of the box, it’s the reason why we can’t provide access to our project and our community to sanctioned countries (Cuba being one that really hurts me, but mainly Iran right now, which makes me really sad because I’m having to answer people from Iran almost weekly asking on how they can be a part of the project with “unfortunately you can’t”).

    I dream of a day where Fedora’s trademark changed to the hands of a non-profit foundation outside of the US.

      • joojmachine@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        I believe some other distros have this issue, but I’m not sure about specific ones. US laws are pretty complicated by themselves, even more when you try to understand how it affects projects from other countries that are trying to be available on US.

    • Buffalobuffalo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      Responses involving, “Did you typo when you said you were from Tehran, Iran? Sometimes autocorrect changes it from sanctioned [foreign capital, foreign nation] - as we both surely know [foreign nation] is sanctioned allowing contributions to US based software projects. Anyway, check out the Git!” are probably forbidden, surely.

  • Samueru@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Some defaults I would like to see:

    • Have zsh as the interactive shell (And also have its dotfiles in a better location like XDG_CONFIG_HOME/zsh)

    • Btrfs with compression enabled and subvolumes set. (Maybe also timeshift installed, not sure because not everyone uses timeshift for btrfs snapshots).

    • ZRAM (With proper sysctl.conf like PopOS does).

    • Pacman as the package manager with an Aur helper already installed.

    • 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.

    • Comply with the FHS and XDG specs (Arch fucking installs packages to /opt and doesnt set ~/.local/bin as part of PATH)

    • 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.
    • bazsy@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Btrfs with compression enabled and subvolumes set.

      And enable/automate maintenance services for BTRFS. For example: balace should be run on heavily used system disks or scrub could 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?

        • bazsy@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Thanks for the links! I updated my config from z3fold to zsmalloc and adjusted the vm.page-cluster to test these out.

          Reading a bit more, I think when using large max_pool_percent (>30) with Zswap the two solutions are more similar than not. A crucial difference is what use-case is more acceptable since Zswap can cause unresponsiveness (and potential lockup) under high memory pressure. While Zram could result in an OOM crash in a similar worst-case scenario.

          • Samueru@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            Oh I can tell you that zram will not result in an OOM that zswap would prevent:

            I once ran into a bug when using foobar2000 with wine to convert my music library that resulted in an insanely high ram usage, like my 16 GIB ram was filled and then my 32 GIB zram was also filled and the PC froze.

            I just went and edited my zram config to make my zram 48GIB and ran foobar again, it ended the conversion without issue kek. No idea wtf happened but whatever data was being written in memory was being compressed good by zRAM, like very few people would even use a swap partition or file that is more than 32 GIB to begin with.

            I also tested running Zelda tears of the kingdom in yuzu using 4GiB of ram with a big zram and it worked, that game in yuzu is a ramhog and on windows people need 16 GiB of ram and they still max out their swapfile.

            There is also a vid on yt titled zram vs windows pagefile where a user running endevour demostrates how zram can take a bunch of Minecraft mods while windows with the help its of pagefile cant

            Edit: Here is the vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMYTBsjeoTc

    • lud@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      If you don’t want ANYTHING installed by default you should probably just go for the specialized distros that provide that.

      • Samueru@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        The issue with many of those distros is that it usually means that you have to install everything from 0.

        Arch is good at this because the archinstall script speeds it up and you don’t have to choose a DE. But with other distros that use a graphical installer, you are forced to use whatever they ship as the default desktop environment.

        edit: And holy shit properly configuring Btrfs subvolumes from 0 is something that I tried with voidlinux and I ended up breaking the entire install.

  • sebsch@discuss.tchncs.de
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    10 months ago

    Arch should have the same zsh profile you have on the live image, installed after the installation by default.

    • CalicoJack@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      grml-zsh-config is its name, and it’s always one of the first things I install on a fresh system. I’ll never understand why it isn’t the default.

    • ichbean@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      Arch doesn’t have zsh installed by default. In case people wanted this profile - it’s in extra grml-zsh-config.

  • Domi@lemmy.secnd.me
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    10 months ago

    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
      • silly goose meekah@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        There’s retroPie, based on Raspberry Pi OS Lite, which is in turn based on Debian. There ya go.

        Edit: never mind, I just learned retroPie is actually just an application, not a full OS

  • r1veRRR@feddit.de
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    10 months ago

    Just in general: More sane defaults, less RTFM. Sure, you can configure everything, but MUST you? A lot of opensource developers seem to believe that configurability is a get-out-of-jail-free card for having to provide a good user experience out of the box.

    • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip
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      10 months ago

      I’d do something similar but not the same. Set up Deb, flatpak and snap support out of the box but default everything to Deb. And in the software center, allow you to change the default packaging of newly installed software.

  • callyral [he/they]@pawb.social
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • ransomwarelettuce@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      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. . .

  • XTL@sopuli.xyz
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
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      10 months ago

      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.

  • nycki@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    pacman and nix are both really neat conceptually but they both fail at the most obvious usability test, which is “I just want to install a package”; its like exiting vim all over again.

    edit: yes, I know you can set an alias to pacman -Sy or whatever, but if you need to set up an alias for a command to be usable, then I can’t in good faith recommend that OS to anyone, and I don’t want to use an OS I wouldn’t recommend to others.

    • ccdfa@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      What’s complex about pacman? I’ve found pacman to be more reliable and easier to manage than apt, so I’m just curious about your experience

      • nycki@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        My experience with pacman was via rwfus on steam deck. I was coming in as someone with experience with apt, npm, pip, even choco and winget on windows. My expectation from pretty much every other command line tool is that commands are verbs, flags are adverbs. So having to install with “pacman -S” (or is it “pacman -Sy”?) just feels unnecessarily cryptic. Same with “nix-env -iA”. I understand that there are some clever internals going on under the hood, but you can have clever internals and sane defaults. For instance, “npm install foo” both downloads the package to node_modules and updates package.json for me, so I can see what change was made to my environment. Nix should do that.

    • Bogasse@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      Yeah, I don’t understand how you could make installing vim simpler than pacman -S vim? Is it about “-S” being less obvious than “install”?

      • blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk
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        10 months ago

        How about pacman install vim or pacman --install vim or pacman -i vim

        What the heck does S mean?! What’s all the syncing nonsense. A million obscure parameters that are all single letter, don’t tie in with anything meaningful. You might be used to it, but it’s a mess of parameters.

        • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
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          10 months ago

          My guess is it’s called sync because it’s the “do stuff directly relating to remote repository” sub-command, including remote repo search (–sync --search) and syncing package database/updating packages (–sync --refresh --sysupgrade). Notably, installing or updating a local package file you do with --upgrade.

          A lot of package managers just have separate commands instead. It’s just a matter of organization.

        • KubeRoot@discuss.tchncs.de
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          10 months ago

          To me that’s part of the ideology I associate with Arch. If you actually use -h in pacman, I find that the help is presented in a nice and contextual way. You only need a few commands on a daily basis, and most of the other things you might need are easy to figure out when you need them.

          In regard to -S being confusing, I think it’s basically making the external operations map to how the software works internally. I feel like learning what the software is doing, rather than expecting the software to hide away the details, is also part of it. When you want to do more complex operations, or when something breaks, you’ll have a better understanding of what happened.

          I wouldn’t mind a better interface, I’m not claiming it’s the best it can be or even close to it, but I wouldn’t want the improvement to come at the cost of obscuring how the software works. I don’t want the commands categorized just by convenience rather than logic, or magic buttons that automatically perform a sequence of hidden operations. I want something I can learn, understand, commands I can dissect into their components, not something I’m expected to use in the 10 ways provided and hope it does what I need.

          I see this in the same way as people tend to use git - some GUIs will offer convenient buttons with their own made up names, and when git throws an unexpected error, the user will have no idea what the error means, or what the software did to get there.

          People often complain that git doesn’t make sense. They might have a point in terms of it being unintuitive… But I find that with a general understanding how it’s built and what the commands do, the complaints are often people trying to force the issue using the wrong tool for the job.

          And, honestly, sorry for the rant. In the end it’s just my opinion, I don’t want to force it on anybody, I just started writing and kept finding things I wanted to elaborate on. If you’re reading this, I hope you have a good day!

        • Samueru@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          You can use an alias for that. Or even a wrapper script that intercepts that.

          For example you could place this script in your PATH named idk mmm installpkg (install might be an issue for a name)

          Which would do the following:

          #!/bin/sh
          
          sudo pacman -S $@
          

          So when you type installpkg vim it will run sudo pacman -S vim

          You can repeat that for pacman -Syu, pacman -Rsn, etc. You can even replace pacman for your aur helper instead. (remove the sudo if you will use an aur helper instead).

            • Samueru@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              alias totally works, but if you want to simplify it for multiple package managers then it is better to use a script.

              Like this example that when the user types pkginstall vim, pkginstall would be a script in path that would do the operation regarless of the package manager:

              # Install with 'pacman' (if available)
              if command -v pacman >/dev/null 2>&1; then
                  sudo pacman -S $@ || exit 1
              fi
              
              # Install with 'apt' (if available)
              if command -v apt >/dev/null 2>&1; then
                  sudo apt install $@ || exit 1
              fi
              
              # Install with 'dnf' (if available)
              if command -v dnf >/dev/null 2>&1; then
                  sudo dnf install $@ || exit 1
              fi
              

              They could even install it in their ~/.local/bin, and as long as their distro makes that part of PATH (which arch does not kek) by just using that same home with another distro they already could install/remove packages and update using those wrapper scripts regardless of the distro.

              If you are wondering why the script needs to check if the package manager exists, it is because when testing it I discovered that if the first one is not installed it will cancel the operation and not continue, and if I remove the exit 1 it will attempt to use the next package manager when canceling the operation with ctrl+c.

      • nycki@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        I’ve also seen it as pacman -Sy and pacman -Syu and so on. I really just think “install” should be a subcommand, not a flag. That’s really my only issue I guess, I’ve only ever used pacman via rwfus on steam deck so maybe my usability problem is with that.