What could your distro learn from another distro?

pmk@lemmy.sdf.org to Linux@lemmy.ml – 212 points –

For example, I'm using Debian, and I think we could learn a thing or two from Mint about how to make it "friendlier" for new users. I often see Mint recommended to new users, but rarely Debian, which has a goal to be "the universal operating system".
I also think we could learn website design from.. looks at notes ..everyone else.

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Just installed Debian today. Jesus the site/wiki is ugly

What's wrong with it?

I mean... Gestures vaguely

Debian wiki screenshot

What do you mean, I'm a web dev and that looks completely normal.

Its missing tons of images, CSS and unnecessary frameworks. So no, it is not normal

Sorry if my irony wasn't too obvious. It certainly is not supposed to look that way. There are a lot of pages all over the internet that function just as garbage as this, especially on mobile. That's why I meant it looks "normal" as in not out of the ordinary.

For me it's mostly that the site sprawls in unintuitive ways. It's possible to have a simple look while being easy to navigate, for example (and this is subjective, but still) https://www.openbsd.org/

I miss when this style of website was more popular for software projects. There are plenty of projects with modern websites that still manage to do it well, but there's just something about the instant familiarity that comes with that type of layout.

You probably shouldn't be accessing a linux distro's website from mobile but yeah the site does look weird and amateur

You probably shouldn't be accessing a linux distro's website from mobile

Well how else am I going to access it, I borked my computer mid-install :P

You probably shouldn't be accessing a linux distro's website from mobile

I don't think it's good to hand-wave a website's poor user experience and instead blame the user's device. The fact of the matter is that Debian's website is not as responsive as it could (imo, should) be and results in a bad user experience. With mobile traffic being responsible for over 55% of the internet's traffic, it can be generally assumed a user's first experience learning about a distro will be on a mobile device. If that first impression is bad, that can spell bad news for that distro's adoption/onboarding.