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

What would you change?

  • joojmachine@lemmy.ml
    301·
    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.

    • Buffalobuffalo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      2·
      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.

  • GravitySpoiled@lemmy.mlEnglish
    336·
    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.

    • z00s@lemmy.world
      121·
      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

    • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
      8·
      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.

      • Josh@sh.itjust.works
        27·
        10 months ago

        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.

    • bia@lemmy.world
      4·
      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
      31·
      10 months ago

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

  • Samueru@lemmy.world
    243·
    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.worldEnglish
      3·
      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.worldEnglish
          1·
          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
            1·
            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
      2·
      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
        1·
        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.

  • kugmo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    16·
    10 months ago

    I’d just want more package maintainers for Arch, some people maintaining 1000+ packages is crazy and would take a load off of them.

      • silly goose meekah@lemmy.world
        3·
        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

  • pastermil@sh.itjust.works
    162·
    10 months ago

    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).

  • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2210·
    10 months ago

    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.

      • lud@lemm.ee
        22·
        10 months ago

        Gnome is incredibly annoying to use for me. KDE is so much better.

    • YourMomsTrashman@lemmy.world
      4·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      10 months ago

      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?

    • Loucypher@lemmy.ml
      21·
      10 months ago

      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.

  • beirdobaggins@lemmy.world
    10·
    10 months ago

    Every distro.

    Samba file shares should use regular user credentials and not have separate samba usernames and passwords.

    • Xartle@lemmy.ml
      1·
      10 months ago

      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.

  • halfway_neko@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    8·
    10 months ago

    (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).

    • Falcon@lemmy.world
      5·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • flashgnash@lemm.ee
      2·
      10 months ago

      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

  • nycki@lemmy.world
    113·
    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.

    • Bogasse@lemmy.ml
      4·
      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”?

      • nycki@lemmy.world
        1·
        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.

    • ccdfa@lemm.ee
      31·
      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
        2·
        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.

  • ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • cyanarchy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        10 months ago

        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.

    • kronarbob@lemmy.world
      3·
      10 months ago

      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.

  • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    61·
    10 months ago

    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 :)

  • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
    5·
    10 months ago

    EndeavourOS:

    • Install portals along with Flatpak, depending on DE (+ GTK, always)
    • btrfs + assistant, snapper, snap-pac as default (ideally also bootable snapshots)
    • Provide not only printer, but also scanner support
    • Enable pstate driver for AMD CPUs by default
    • 1-click solution to enable recommended tweaks for gaming / interactive use
    • On KDE desktop:
      • Add dbus service to start Kwallet
      • Configure Kwallet to require no password, but confirmation for access
      • Ship with Discover