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?
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.
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.
if i understand correctly the testing branch is similar to ubuntu non-lts?
Somewhat but it is a rolling release. Packages will be major-updated constantly.
is it stable?
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)
Going upstream to Debian
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.
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.
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.
I haven’t installed KDE in a long time. But installing both Gnome and Window Maker next to Mint’s Cinnamon was absolutely breezy.
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’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.
That’s plain wrong.
Like so much of the Linux stuff that’s thrown around in here. It’s frustrating.
I guess with immutable linux distros, it would be possible, as fat as I understand.
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.
Do other distributions like Debian, Alpine, or Arch also have this issue?
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.
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.
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?
It is just that zram is much faster than zswap because it uses the ram to store compressed memory. Android already uses it by default.
These are worth reading:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/mzun99/new_zram_tuning_benchmarks/ https://linuxreviews.org/The_Benefits_Of_Having_A_Compressed_zram_Swap_Device_On_Linux
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.
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
If you don’t want ANYTHING installed by default you should probably just go for the specialized distros that provide that.
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.
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Arch should have the same zsh profile you have on the live image, installed after the installation by default.
grml-zsh-configis 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.Arch doesn’t have zsh installed by default. In case people wanted this profile - it’s in extra
grml-zsh-config.
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
Remove snaps
I like how this comment didn’t even need to mention the distro name ##### ubuntu
hahaha! I almost put Ubuntu, but I knew everyone would know exactly what I was talking about.
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).
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.
Being on Debian haha
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
Make sure images with WiFi drivers and firmware are easy to find.
That’s included in the main installation iso now.
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?
I would change the name to drugs.
I use drugs btw.
Debian Retro Universal Gaming System
Someone make that a thing.
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
I’d just want more package maintainers for Arch, some people maintaining 1000+ packages is crazy and would take a load off of them.
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 get rid of snaps.
You just inadvertently triggered a lot of Scandinavians
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.
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. . .
