Examples could be things like specific configuration defaults or general decision-making in leadership.
What would you change?
Examples could be things like specific configuration defaults or general decision-making in leadership.
What would you change?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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
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.
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
.
hahaha! I almost put Ubuntu, but I knew everyone would know exactly what I was talking about.
Fedora:
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).
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.
Make sure images with WiFi drivers and firmware are easy to find.
That's included in the main installation iso now.
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.
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'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.
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?
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.
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.
The documentation. It needs more of it.
::: spoiler 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. . .
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"?
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.
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.
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!
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).
I think the point is that if one needs to read a thousand pages of documentation before they can start using a new operating system they will just give up regardless of how good it is.
Installing packages is probably one of the first things you'd want to do so there is a lot of value in keeping its design intuitive.
The 'you can make an alias or script for it' argument only works if someone already has a working understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Which you can assume it someone gradually gets introduced to a Programme, but not if they are making a big switch like installing a new OS.
Oh I totally agree with that. But I don't think the regular a new user should be using CLI tools to install packages. There are plenty of GUI tools that should be doing that for you instead.
And if they did, it should be very simplified with a wrapper script like in the example above, iirc the common command update-grub is a wrapper script that simplifies it, it is a shame this isn't more common with other tasks.
This could be even standardized, like regardless of the distro if you type installpkg vim, the installpkg script would do something like this that will run it thru the most popular packages managers to do the simple operation:
# 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
echo "No package manager found"
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.
Thanks for the solid explanation.
As a noob that doesn't change my distro too often, I never would have thought of something like this.
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
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!