What would you change about your favorite Linux distribution?
Examples could be things like specific configuration defaults or general decision-making in leadership.
What would you change?
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.
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
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:
Edit: Also forgot to mention:
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?
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
Arch should have the same zsh profile you have on the live image, installed after the installation by default.
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.
Arch doesn't have zsh installed by default. In case people wanted this profile - it's in extra grml-zsh-config.
Fedora:
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
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
Debian
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?
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'd just want more package maintainers for Arch, some people maintaining 1000+ packages is crazy and would take a load off of them.
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.
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. . .
Stop using GNOME as de facto default standard. Fr I despise this crap
I seriously don't understand how anyone from windows is going to find stock GNOME even remotely intuitive or useful.
What kind of sick bastard thought "Yeah you know what, people don't need minimize and expand buttons."
And then on top of that, they put in the most basic default modern android chromeos looking shell/menu as if this is some mobile OS that runs all its apps on the JVM and that everyone knows trackpad kung fu.
For such a "simple" desktop, it eats through ram like it's KDE with all the fancy animations enabled.
Frickin Compiz solved the problem of performance and features over a decade ago. Use the god damn thing. If you need wayland, then at least KDE please.
If you're coming from Mac, only then will GNOME feel somewhat familiar because of the shell. Otherwise, please just make the download either an ISO with several DEs or a menu to select the DE first. Or at the very least, make a better default GNOME setup.
I seriously don’t understand how anyone from windows is going to find stock GNOME even remotely intuitive or useful.
GNOME is a very easy transition from MacOS, however. There are even themes to make it almost indistinguishable.
The truly awful one is "default the cursor on the save dialog to the Search input box, NOT the filename box". I install Gnome every once in a while to check it out, and the second I encounter that dialog still behaving like that, I rip the whole marianne right out.
Like what insane monster thinks that's reasonable?
Gnome is literally the only usable DE right now
If that's true, it's very good we use a wm.
You didn't even mention the worst part, you can't change the default terminal emulator.
I do like gnome for how out of the way it stays. It's easy for new users to understand its lack of distractions and start to actually just use software on it. It's got its target audience.
I'm not saying it can't be done better. Cinnamon, my current personal choice, does most of the same things right.
I haven't used KDE much because of graphical issues on my device, but it seems like a nightmare getting workspaces or gestures set up. It seems like the polar opposite of 'distractionless', where you can spend hours learning and/or getting lost in a maze of submenus. I understand that's an appeal to some.
I want to love KDE, and I might retry sometime soon, but as a casual it does make me appreciate what gnome is doing.
True true, plasma the default or XFCE like is used on Mint would be way better
Kde doesn't use much ram. It hasn't done so for ages.
You made me chuckle :) True, if coming from macOS, Gnome can be familiar enough but the defaults are terrible. Even those used to Macs need to install/enable the basics like maximise/minimise buttons etc. I don’t understand why even a Gnome centric distro like Fedora doesn’t come with Gnome Tweaks installed by default… Let alone the fact that usually the average user will also install a bunch of extensions. That is why Ubuntu is arguably the one doing the better job out of the box: their Gnome is actually useful from the get go.
No snaps or flatpak by default.
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.
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
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.
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"?
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.
(Arch, btw)
Technical: Better, easier to use APIs for pacman. The last time I tried to do alpm stuff, it wasn't fun.
Social: Less rtfm. The manual is good, but it's not cool when people are super elitist (especially towards newbies).
The manual is OK, much of it’s out dated and often outright wrong. It is still a great document.
Edits to the wiki are often knocked back if they weren’t made by the inner circle, discussions on the back page are often closed and frankly the TUs are mostly wankers. The forum policy on necro-bumping leaves half answers everywhere but the notion of “put it in the wiki” is undermined by the toxic community among inner party members.
Arch is a great middle ground between Fedora and Gentoo, but I had to walk away because the community was so toxic and childish.
I’m using void and Gentoo now and I’m pretty happy, anything that doesn’t run works in a container anyway.
TL;DR: community behaviour is much more important to me than technical use.
Not just for arch but the community in general is also really quick to suggest you change the technology you're using.
I've had a couple occasions before where I've mentioned a problem and people immediately tell me to use their window manager of choice instead because it's better
Every distro.
Samba file shares should use regular user credentials and not have separate samba usernames and passwords.
Unfortunately my understanding is that this is essentially impossible. SMB hashes the password on the client-side, and the hashing algorithm isn't compatible with the algorithms used in /etc/shadow (it's unsalted and less secure). I doubt Linux distros would want to have another field in /etc/shadow just for Samba passwords, and deal with keeping them in sync.
Samba can use standard Linux users, but there's no way to reuse the same passwords.
If it really bothers you, I think you could set up authentik (or some other idp) and point all your login needs at it... Though, it's not going to make things easier for you, just the opposite. Probably a good learning experience though.
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!
Unpopular take: A more complex installer that lets me choose what I want to use:
I don't know what else could be interesting, but I think that would take away the annoying "what distro to I want" and would make Linux more like "I like gnome, everything installed, I'm a developer" or "KDE plasma, graphics and office, the rest inwant to install myself"
Maybe I totally don't understand what distros are, but isn't all the same, just some differen configurations?
Arch?
I haven't used any of the arch install scripts but they seem to have regular problems. Doing it the usual way is a proper way to roll your own but it doesn't give you options. You have to know what you want, or you have to know where to find out what exists.
The guided installer is going to be important to a type of person we're going to see more and more of: power users that know what they want to do, but for whom the Linux ecosystem is a foreign and fractous entity what uses entirely unfamiliar nomenclature.
I believe that Debian Unstable has you covered
/j
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.
A better way to uninstall software.
While I've been re-learning my way around Mint, I've found that some software doesn't show up in the GUI package manager. Removing it with Apt doesn't give the option to remove dependencies or optional extras by default, you have to do it manually. Installing something from Github has to be done separately.
Even if it's an optional extra, some software that monitors installations and cleanly uninstalls them would be handy :)
Learning to use autoremove will do that. I also like good old debfoster.
Debfoster looks interesting, but they both seem to just deal with Apt. Something that covers the whole system would be ideal :)
Linux Mint - More up to date packages. Especially the kernel.
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.
They now have a mint "edge" iso that has a significantly newer kernel!
Fedora:
-Window tiling without an extension -Ability to open a program on a certain workspace without an extension -An equivalent to Time Machine -Minimizing/expending buttons by default -Gnome calendar easily displaying your thunderbird calendar -Ability to easily try other DE
Otherwise everything is perfectly fine
An equivalent to Time Machine
Doesn't timeshift work? If you installed fedora with Btrfs which is the default it should work unless the default subvolumes used by fedora are not compatible with what timeshift expects.
Sorry if you meant to say that they should have it by default and you are already using timeshift.
Well I’m using Clonezilla because apparently Timeshift has to be set up in a precise way to work on Fedora. To be honest, I don’t have enough knowledge to set up complicated things so that’s why I think it should kind of be enabled by default.
With some things I can take risks but not with a backup tool (even if it’s mostly to backup my settings as the files are saved on kDrive).
bootloaders should always be packaged with a pacman hook
I’d like a vanilla, stable, rolling release. Fedora is close but I’d like a “clean slate” option where you have the desktop environment, package manager, and expected hardware functionality like sound, Bluetooth, etc. But then as few extras as possible so I can choose my own adventure.
And by stable rolling release, I just mean that most rolling release options are for beta testing. I totally get the reasons for that but while we’re wishing for things, I’d like a rolling release that was almost as conservative as an LTS release. I doubt that’s realistic but a feller can dream.
A lot of people will probably tell you that what you're asking for is an oxymoron. It's not, it sounds very cool, it just occupies a point on the spectrum that's likely to take a lot of work to keep in an arbitrary balance between rock solid and bleeding edge.
Yeah, I don’t even think it’s realistic because of how software development works in real life. It’s really hard to coordinate things even with a release cadence. It’s more a North Star to work towards than something I expect to happen.
I'm looking for a stable rolling too. But since yesterday, I've quit tumbleweed for fedora.
I left tumbleweed because I wasn't able to find/install/update non flatpak application. The bug is only for KDE (gnome last ISO works fine, but not the KDE ISO). It was not much of a problem since everything else worked for me, but I find it weird to not fix that kind of bug, even on a ISO.
I guess void Linux would be the answer, but it requires a bit of work to set it up. Maybe, when I'll have time to learn a bit more about it.
Slow roll would be another option I guess : 1 month slower than Tumbleweed, but it is still flagged as experimental by suse.
Solus has been revived last year. I tested their first iso from 2023. I found it laggy and didn't liked the package manager, but 1 year can make big changes on Linux.
Have A zsh shell with fzf history and zsh syntax highlighting installed
Arch install script could be better. The dedicated /home partition is a pain if you don't know what you're doing (I don't know what I'm doing). The encryption thing also breaks a lot of things.
Btrfs and subvolumes are your friends. See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/btrfs#Subvolumes
What's the problem with dedicated home?
If you don't partition correctly and don't allocate enough storage for /home and your root for usr/share, you might run out of space quickly. I put like most of of my storage in /home and soon enough I ran out of space as I was downloading heavier files from the aur. Completely ran out of space on the usr/share partition.
EndeavourOS:
For Arch Linux:
I couldn’t agree more with this, projects like artix are undermined by all the hard dependencies on systemd and Bash.
Void attracted me because of the support for posix, runit and musl (plus good zfs support). It’s unfortunate that Arch doesn’t have that greater portability.
zsh
Weird way to spell fish
But why zsh? I thought it's basically just bash?
Why not fish, oil shell or whatever is up with ddevault's shell?
There are many advantages relative to bash, especially much better array handling, and comprehensive globbing and expansion expressions. You can reduce your reliance on external tools, which may have multiple alternative implementations (a source of unpredictability).
Some defenses are written up at
https://www.arp242.net/why-zsh.html
(not my post)
For me, fish's differences from older shells count against it without offering any compelling benefits.
Newer shells like nushell and oils/ysh are exciting and have a lot going on, but are not mature or familiar.
Debian (testing branch): Add normal firefox to the repo. Firefox ESR is total bullshit that makes zero sense to use. I always install it either as flatpak or from the unstable repos using apt-pinning (which works great though!)
I think Mozilla just released a Firefox apt repository a few months ago.
Mint - Firstly Wayland support, but that's been said before.
But one small annoyance is that they ship with a version of synaptic in the repos that doesn't allow software upgrades. The reason for this is that they want you to go through their update manager (which doesn't work for me, but eh). But seriously, for an OS and ecosystem which is supposed to be pro-user agency, why arbitrarily restrict people like that? I end up having to pin a specific version of it.
LinuxMint
Package manager like yay for the community packages of openSuse tumbleweed.
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.
PopOs
Not have 10s of GBs of updates every week. I mean seriously wtf.
Fedora's bootloader sucks, I want to use SDBoot but it's set up so weirdly that installing it would break the install.
You have two options to switch to systemd-boot on Fedora:
Use inst.sdboot as kernel parameter while installing Fedora, see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/cleanup_systemd_install
Or use conversation scripts systemd-boot-conversion provided by Sebastiaan Franken
I used the script for two of my installations without any issues: systemd-boot-install-fedora-no-secureboot.sh
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.
The everything ISO is more granular, but not to the point of openSUSE. Way back in the day you could mess with package selections in depth.
Kubuntu
Remove snap < caused loads of shit back in the day, now it's an extremely slow installation system that wants to force me to use it. Fuck you.
Remove systemd < promised to be a super fast init system, took over loads of shit it has nothing to do with and ended up being nothing faster at all. Now my logs are sometimes in actual log files, you know, easy text, sometimes they're in the headache callled journalctl. I always change my SSH server port (Ubuntu server) that was a quick config file change and restart ssh, now it's making systemd files, and 10 minutes to do. Its a constant headache and I fucking hate everything about it
I wish Debian had a version with more recent software that is suitable for regular use. I know many people use Testing and Sid, but Testing often has delayed security updates and it’s not unusual for Sid to break. And both get weird around the freeze for the next release. It would be great if there was a version like Tumbleweed that was constantly rolling and received automated testing to prevent many of the problems Unstable experiences.
I currently use Tumbleweed on my computers and Debian on my servers, but I would love to use Debian on everything.
Nothing. Artix gives me all the freedoms.
I wish arch had proper printing support, I've never ever been able to get it to work no matter how much I RTFM. I think it should be something you choose at install or that you could set up in an automated fashion.
CUPS? Use the localhost webpage to configure
I adore CUPS. One of the killer apps of Linux if you ask me.
Arch: Move more of the things shipped by the distro to /usr/, too many things are still in /etc/, /var/ and /srv/. Generally this isn't a problem, but when you want to make an A/B updated image where only /usr/ is shipped it is a bit annoying. Also, bash has no way to have a "distro" version of /etc/profile.
Another benefit is: no .pacnew files in /etc/ (or anywhere else) since those would all be managed by the system maintainer and aren't touched by the package manager
Bring back Linux Mint KDE
Stop using stupid adjective/animal for release names. When editing an apt list I don't want to have to lookup "which release was 'xenial'?" Just use the yy.mm format.
I have never really been an Ubuntu user. When I started reading your comment, I was thinking “well that seems like a prettt small nitpick”. Then I realized the problem and now I am 100% behind you. You are right, they elate throwing away one of the greatest strengths of the distro in that releases ( numbered releases ) have easy to understand and very meaningful names.
So much information thrown away just to be cute.
Is there a reason? Do the dots in the release numbers confuse things? Or is it purely historical?
Somebody needs to create a fork of APT that does this ( uses release numbers instead ). It could translate the release numbers you use in your sources file to the code names before making the request. I mean, they are unambiguously convertable.
Is there a reason? Do the dots in the release numbers confuse things? Or is it purely historical?
I think it goes back to Debian using "Toy Story" characters for releases - they're in the same bed here as Ubuntu (I'm running "bullseye"). I'm not sure how it started but it's too cute for no gain. At least the docker images are tagged with both so you don't need to remember whether "jammy" is an LTS or not.
I wish Ubuntu was just xUbuntu by default and that xfce didn’t have like 4 different settings menus for no reason. I’d also like it if there was a minimalist icon theme by default, and a dock like old school vanilla Ubuntu.
Oh and better multi monitor support
I would want a FreeBSD type of packaging system where system libraries and apps are different. Their binary packages are separated into quarterly and latest so you get a very stable OS but either Debian or arch style package updates.
Debian needs a better installer. It'd be awesome if it had something more akin to Fedora/RHEL's Anaconda, or even just made Calamares the default (so long as it didn't install every single locale available like their live inages currently do).
I wish Debian had better support for software that wants to do its own package management.
They do it a little bit with python, but for most things it's either "stay within the wonderful Debian package management but then find out that the node thing you want to do is functionally impossible" or "abandon apt for a mismashed patchwork of randomly-placed and haphazardly-secured independently downloaded little mini-repos for Node, python, maybe some Docker containers, Composer, snap, some stuff that wants you to just wget a shell script and pipe it to sudo sh, and God help you, Nvidia drivers. At least libc6 is secure though."
I wish that there was a big multiarch-style push to acknowledge that lots of things want to do their own little package management now, and that's okay, and somehow bring it into the fold (again their pyenv handling seems like a pretty good example of how it can be done in a mutually-working way) so it's harmonious with the packaging system instead of existing as something of an opponent to it. Maybe this already exists and I'm not aware of it but if it exists I'm not aware of it.