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

What would you change?

  • TXL@sopuli.xyz
    0·
    2 years 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
      0·
      2 years 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.

    • hellvolution@lemmygrad.ml
      0·
      2 years ago

      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?

  • beirdobaggins@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 years ago

    Every distro.

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

    • dan@upvote.au
      0·
      2 years ago

      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.

  • clemdemort@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 years ago

    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.

  • ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 years 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
      0·
      2 years 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.

    • kronarbob@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 years 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.

  • Andy@programming.dev
    0·
    2 years ago

    For Alpine Linux:

    • support a different process supervisor
      • dinit, or
      • s6 with some high level sugar
    • add something like the AUR
  • words_number@programming.dev
    0·
    2 years ago

    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!)

  • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
    0·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • LeFantome@programming.dev
      0·
      2 years ago

      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?

      https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace?tab=readme-ov-file

      • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
        0·
        2 years ago

        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!

    • sebsch@discuss.tchncs.de
      0·
      2 years ago

      Maybe you should switch your favourite then?

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

        • sebsch@discuss.tchncs.de
          0·
          2 years 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.

        • Para_lyzed@lemmy.world
          0·
          2 years 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.

  • MagneticFusion@lemm.ee
    0·
    2 years ago

    I tried to think very hard for OpenSuse TW but there honestly is nothing, other than maybe not shipping duplicate apps (e.g. two camera apps) with the ISO.

    • not_amm@beehaw.org
      0·
      2 years ago

      I’d say updated documentation, there are some articles in their wiki/documentation that don’t consider the default configuration for openSUSE, but an old one I think.

  • Samueru@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 years 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

    • 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)

      • Samueru@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 years 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.

    • bazsy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 years 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?

  • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
    0·
    2 years ago

    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.