What could your distro learn from another distro?
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.
Every distro could learn from Arch Wiki
Even Arch Linux could learn from the Arch Wiki.
The Debian Wiki would actually like a word.
There is stuff in there that's not found anywhere else. For example while researching driverless printing recently I found a huge page on the Debian Wiki but the Arch wiki only has a paragraph saying supporting printers should be detected automatically.
The Debian wiki is awsome. But it's less noob friendly than Arch wiki.
The web UI looks like an old forum from 2000. Don't get me wrong, a well written manpage style webpage is way better than an eye candy bloated scripted webpage (IMO) and I really like how detailed the Debian wiki is. But in today's "mental standards", the Debian wiki is not attractive enough for most new comer.
Also, It seems the Debian wiki is not as indexed as Arch wiki on the web.
Finally... I can't access their wiki with my VPN ! :/.
But I do agree, The Debian wiki is a gold mine !!!
Can you send that one? I'm actually researching driverless printing right now
https://wiki.debian.org/CUPSDriverlessPrinting
Who made the Arch Wiki? Was it done by the community? Genuine question.
Yup.
The one thing I wish every distro would incorporate is the way Gentoo handles config file updates. If there are any changes you get the option of using a very simple side by side merge where you go through all the differences of the old and new configuration where you can decide which one to use going forward.
While you will get somewhat the same from apt, I like the Debian way of providing base config support in packages and have local config loaded by include statements.
As you don’t edit the default config and automatic updates can happen w/o user input and your config will stay safe
That's the way it should be. But it depends on the software.
What really sucks about the Debian way is how it tries to start daemons in the post-install scripts and if that fails (say because the default config tries to use a port already taken) the entire package system shits itself and is unusable until you fix it.
Usually just the one package fails, unless you have other packages that have a dependency on it. I agree that it's annoying though.
Well, it stays in that half installed state and interferes with any other use of the package manager.
I might be a special case as I Mostly use Linux for servers. But I have maybe experienced one such case on the last three years on our 50-odd servers
I've ran into that with one shitty vendor (I won't/can't give any details beyond this) lately. They 'support' deb-based distributions, but specially their postinst-scripts don't have any kind of testing/verification on the environment they're running in and it seems to find new and exiting ways to break every now and then. I'm experienced (or old) enough with Linux/Debian that I can go around the loopholes they've left behind, but in our company there's not too many others who have sufficient knowledge on how deb-packages work.
And they even either are dumb or play one when they claim that their packages work as advertised even after I sent them their postinst-scripts from the package, including explanations on why this and that breaks on a system which doesn't have graphical environment installed (among other things).
But that's absolutely fault on the vendor side, not Debian/Linux itself. But it happens.
Pacman just dumps you a .pacnew, leaving the comparison to you (y'know, KISS). Your change isn't touched, unless it's .pacsave.
Pacdiff does this on arch-based distros
Fedora, NixOS and Void need a proper wiki like Arch
Most distros could also learn from Arch and create something similar to the AUR. Nix is going in the right direction.
And I guess almost all distros could learn from Artix and Devuan and reconsider if systemd is the right choice.
honestly I wished the arch wiki turned into a distro agnostic wiki. i have been using debian for decades and use arch wiki all the time but it would be nice to have a one stop shop for linux documentation. the Wikipedia of Linux run as a coalition.
NixOS is at least starting to work on a new wiki. The old one is gone and is only accessible from archive.org.
That's great
Seconded. NixOS's documentation has consistently been the worst I've read, always forcing me to go to the source code to try and understand what in the world is happening. It makes quick changes to new things nigh impossible. I had to resort to taking notes when I understood things about nix in order to retain the knowledge or at least link to where I could easily regain it.
The nixos wiki was marginally better and https://nixlang.wiki/ has been better. However the latter is less known so has less content. All in all, nix documentation is still bad.
::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 :::
NixOS has the best concept and even pioneered it, but whether its implementation and documentation is perfect is a topic for debate.
However, it's been quite long since I had to fiddle with my config and as such, the downsides don't really affect one on a daily basis. In fact, I recently reinstalled my machine to change the root filesystem and it was an absolute breeze. If not for secure boot, it would have been absolutely trivial, and with secure boot it was easy and convenient.
As such, I consider the pains an investment into system that runs much better down the road. Though I'd love it if these pains were reduced.
I'm assuming "AMD" is a typo?
::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 :::
Yes! Apologies, didn't proofread what my phone produced from swiping
It would've been welcome and surprising news! 😄
::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 :::
I'll definitely check that out, thanks
i've seen Void's
xbps-srctool compared to the AUR multiple times in /r/voidlinux (and i guess it's like a decentralized AUR?? you can build+install pkgs from source using the package manager, sure, but there's no one big diy xbps packages registry like aur.archlinux.org for Void) and while i don't really see it, if you follow that train of thought, void's pretty set in the "right direction" :DI heard about it, but haven't tried it out properly yet.
Github.com/void-linux/void-packages.git
The Debian Wiki is so much better than the Arch one.
Absolutely not
This has to be bait.
It is not
Not approachable at all.
Just installed Debian today. Jesus the site/wiki is ugly
What's wrong with it?
I mean... Gestures vaguely
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.
I know what you mean, I remember when debians website was like this: https://web.archive.org/web/20021122032757/http://www.debian.org/
Is it just a generation thing, or is it objectively easiler to navigate?
I don't even see any video or infinite-scrolling pages.
You probably shouldn't be accessing a linux distro's website from mobile but yeah the site does look weird and amateur
Well how else am I going to access it, I borked my computer mid-install :P
Yeah, just curl it into aplay like the rest of us, jeez
No excuse for websites that render poorly on mobile nowadays.
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.
Looks fine to me.
I think more distros should have an easy way to set up disk level encryption in the installation
And know how to use an existing btrfs partition. And always [at least have an option to] show exactly what the automatic installer is going to do before I run anything. There's gotta be a middle ground between "we'll just surprise you" and "here, do everything yourself".
OpenSUSE has a guided setup if you dont want a surprise or don't know what manual setups requires. then prior to starting givea you a summary of what will be done.
Great, there we go, sounds like all distros should learn from OpenSUSE.
Each one has good parts, but I think openSUSE did a lot to make things easier for new users to linux
I usually use Fedora these days and I have few complaints but I sometimes miss the ArchWiki. Not that Federa isn’t well-documented — it obviously is well documented by nature of being a RedHat product — but people in the Arch community will sometimes make a whole page to document how they fixed a specific laptop model’s relatively unimportant hardware compatibility issue.
I'm on Fedora too and quite often end up on the Arch wiki. A lot of the stuff there applies on other distros too.
Give me immutable, declarative Arch.
NixOS on your mind too? lol
Yep
I think that's what BlendOS is working towards. You might keep an eye on them.
Oh nice. This looks promising. I'm guessing it's not totally ready yet?
It may be ready, I haven't tried their latest version. Most of the functionality was there, but it had some rough spots. I've been meaning to go back and try daily driving it again.
What do you miss in NixOS (Unstable)?
I think a declarative, atomic LTS distro (e.g. Alma) would be quite nice for business use.
I've been messing about with NixOS for the past 2 weeks or so. While I think I know enough to plug in the right text in the right spots to get a system configured I feel like I understand nothing about the nix language and the syntax is extremely unintuitive to me. If another distro offered declarative configuration as well as something like Nix's options I would easily swap away from NixOS at this point.
Pure lazy unityped lambda calculus, basically a lazy lisp with records instead of lists. Or a pure, lazy, lua.
Pure is important because reproducibility, lazy is important to not have to evaluate all of nixpkgs before you can build anything, lambda calculus well it needs to be turing complete, support things like functions in in some way though TC is only used very, very very deep down in the system. They literally use the y-combinator to do recursion, like when bootstrapping stdenv.
The syntax is unintuitive, yes, but aside from the semicolon cancer actually not that bad. My biggest gripe with the language is it not having a proper type system, like you put a list where a string is expected or the other way around and you get five screenfuls of backtrace through the whole evaluation stack and due to laziness the actual location of the error might not even be in there.
A replacement is actually already in the pipeline.
I gather that not everything is compatible with nixOS, and it's better as a server than for development or as a general OS.
I didn't know Alma was declarative.
Makes sense.
No, I wish for something like Alma, but declarative and atomic :)
It’s something we might see with the next EL release cycle.
rpm-ostreehas treefiles complete with the option for (experimental) lockfiles. There’s already config files for CentOS Stream to build CentOS Stream CoreOS, and those can be adapted for Alma. I think, atm, it’s more of an issue of general interest than technical limitations.Ah nice, thanks for pointing me to it!
Gentoo - patience.
But seriously. With the
USEflags, compiler options, you can understand software more from a developer's point of view.You can try to optimize software for your hardware.
Fully explore the
configureoptions. With a binary package you have no control.Linux Mint could learn from Arch and document...anything. 3/5 of the Mint manual is bitching about Ubuntu and the other 2/5 are about printers.
Relatable, everyone hates printers
Fedora's installer is abysmal. There's a number of installers it could learn from. They're working on one at the moment, so I hope it's good.
Enabling access to proprietary software should also install audio/video codecs. Or at least have a separate checkbox for it, like (I believe) Ubuntu has.
I thought so too. It doesn't have enough options for power users and too many for newcomers. It caters to a middleground that barely exists.
The codecs are also the #1 thing that annoy me in Fedora. Because of shitty US patent laws the rest of the world has to suffer.
Why won't they just use Calamares?
Calamares has poor integration with the rest of the ecosystem including their existing tooling. For example, it has no kickstart support, and no support for their immutable installs (afaik, anyway). It was less effort to put their existing cockpit tooling into anaconda and make a whole new web ui than it would be to add support for all their stuff into calamares.
Fortunately many flatpak browser now comes with codecs, like ungoogled chromium and librewolf.
The installer is the single one reason I can't switch to fedora. I have several drives in my machine and I like to separate them, but their installer scares the shit out of me. I can pull it off for sure, but I just don't want to take the risk
I think with Linux Mint the main User Friendly thing is its DE. But with Debian you can install Cinnamon DE as well. https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=cinnamon
btw, I quite like the Debian website, colors and design.
I am sure you are aware of this: https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
Yes. Nice that there is the Debian choice. And nice that Linux Mint refrains from using Snaps by default like Ubuntu.
That's honestly its biggest advantage over Ubuntu + Cinnamon.
The Debian web site needs a good UX overhaul. Prioritize the things people are most likely to want, make them prominent and uncluttered, and present a logical flow from one task to its follow-ups.
Just a quick glance yields the simplest example: the download link is not the first or most prominent thing on the main page. Clicking "download" gives you the netinst AMD64 ISO, which is reasonable enough, but there is no indication of how to install it. Clicking "user support" takes me to a page with extremely verbose descriptions of IRC, usenet groups, and mailing lists. I think the fastest way to get installation instructions is to click the tiny "other downloads" link (after I've already downloaded the one I want!), and then a link to the manual from there.
This is not a good UX. This is a demographic filter. You can argue that's appropriate for a technically-oriented OS. 9front explicitly makes itself unapproachable to dissuade casual users, but I think Debian can and should be more appealing to mainstream, casual newcomers.
Your opinion, fine. So why do you want Debian to have more mainstream users ?
Why not? It's a great general-purpose distro.
My point is that 9front's user-unfriendliness is a feature (explicitly intended), whereas I think Debian's is a bug (not intended or desired). I'm not psychic, though, so I could be wrong about the Debian team's goals.
As far as I am concerned Ubuntu has since around 2004 already helped a great deal with getting more mainstream Linux users on board. With the new Debian stable release of Bookworm for the very first time non-free firmware came with the installation media and that could be useful for lots of people, but still I will not recommend Debian for people interested in Linux. I will tell usually them to go for Linux Mint or Ubuntu.
Here an example of what I think could do better website design (Not Linux but zsh) : https://www.zsh.org/ And this is also not too appealing to get more mainstream Linux users on board : http://www.slackware.com/ (One of the first Linux distributions. No SSL, but the site seems pretty functional).
Here an example of what I think can appeal to a lot of mainstream : https://bazzite.gg/ That may attract quite some people (though I personally do not like such site design at all) to use Linux.
Then again, people are different. I find the Arch wiki a fantastic resource. Today in a comment on Lemmy someone wrote that it is horrible.
I mostly agree. I usually recommend Mint to new users, largely because their web site and defaults are very beginner-friendly. Mint is the modern version of what Ubuntu used to be 10-15 years ago. At this point I don't think Ubuntu has tangible advantages over Debian for new users.
I really like Slackware's site. It's not sexy, but it's functional, organized, and easy to navigate. The Zsh site is counterintuitive to me with that sidebar-that's-not-really-a-sidebar, and hyperlinks whose text requires the context of a header that is not aligned with them.
I just checked out Ubuntu's web site for comparison, and...uh...now I feel like I owe Debian's web site an apology. I guess the consumer desktop Ubuntu distro doesn't actually have its own web site anymore? I mean, you can get to it from there, but it's hidden under menus, and seems almost like an afterthought. Ubuntu's main web site is bizarre right now, with a prominent green "Download Now" button that does not lead the user anywhere close to downloading Ubuntu, but rather directs them to one of a rotating selection of signup forms to download various technical whitepapers like "A CTO’s guide to real-time Linux". That's a radically different target audience than the last time I went to their web site (and also a weird design anyway).
I guess this has to do with the fact that BDFL Mark Shuttleworth after putting so much money into Ubuntu finally wanted to see some profit (I think I read that Ubuntu was not profitable for a long time) and went in the same direction like RedHat Enterprise and Novell SUSE had been going. If you look at Canonical Juju https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juju_(software) launched 12 years ago, and things like Landscape https://ubuntu.com/landscape which has been there perhaps more than 10 years as well, and now with Ubuntu Pro it seems clear to me that Ubuntu was not just meant to be a desktop Linux distribution. In fact, nowadays when I try to find an iso file for an Ubuntu installation I need to be careful not to end up at a download page for the Ubuntu server iso.
Anyway, maybe I should instead try out and be recommending Pop! OS to new Linux users soon. It seems very popular https://pop.system76.com/ ;-)
Slackware - if it ain't broken don't fix it. Gentoo - USE flags. Mint - user-friendly.
Slackware needs to learn how to be hip like arch. I'm the baby in our irc group, and I'm 40. All the cool kids are using arch BTW.
Never cared much about trends.
It's nice to find another slacker in the wild.
OpenSuSe - snapper for taking btrfs snapshots and rolling back. It’s basically a bulletproof way to do updates and recovery. Get a bad update or change a config in correctly you can roll back. Updates it automagically does this for you
Possible in Debian. The SpiralLinux guy (who also made Gecko Linux) has it set up on install.
I switched my daily driver to Linux Mint Debian Edition recently and it definitely does combine the best of both. It's easy to use and coming from plain debian has everything that I'm used to. Been loving it so far.
I do not recall other distros failing to update due to GPG key issues but it has happened to me on Arch distros many times. It is the biggest pain when converting from something like Manjaro to something like EndeavourOS as well.
I really do not understand why this cannot be fixed.
That's an Arch issue as far as I can tell
Fedora Atomic Desktop, mainly KDE.
Also, their traditional KDE variant is very bloated, which is why I updated this guide
But overall its still my favourite distro. Has a nice community, all the desktops you want, SELinux (which is btw required to make Waydroid somewhat secure) and their atomic stuff is an awesome base thanks to ublue.
You mention that their kernel is bloated, would you mind sharing how you measure it compared to other kernels. Such as their kernel vs something more trimmed down. Is it a storage space savings or memory? I've never really considered the weight of a kernel when considering different distros so if you have some method I'd love to try and compare what I'm running.
I have no comparisons as I think all distros ship the complete monolithic kernel. Of course specific IOT devices or Android ship a very much smaller kernel.
Building the kernel is not that hard, as you have
kernel-develwhich has all the sources.You can use
make menuconfigand see what all is enabled (as far as I understood this) and change stuff before compiling.Monolithic kernels are pretty bad, see this excerpt of the interview with Jeremy Soller on RedoxOS.
So I dont mind memory or even less storage space, as the kernel poorly is not relevant at all here. I just care about keeping the root binary with access to all my stuff as small as possible.
I would love a system that detects the used hardware and then builds the correct small kernel for it. There are experiments making the CentOS LTS kernel work on Fedora, which would prevent many recompilations.
Yeah. Some myth that it's hard to do is not why we end up with monolithic kernels. Like any case where you find yourself thinking "it doesn't look that hard; I could do that easily", it's either harder than it looks or it's done a certain way for an entirely different reason you haven't figured out.
You should learn that reason.
There are many steps that need to be followed, I didnt have the time yet but it is possible. You need to sign the modules and kernel, package as an RPM, sign that maybe etc. Its not as easy if you do it right but also not very hard.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
this excerpt of the interview with Jeremy Soller on RedoxOS
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
If you don't mind me asking, then how do you know the kernel they use is bloated compared to any other kernel? A vast majority of the device-list stuff is loaded only when that device is detected with kernel modules. You aren't actually running everything from the entire kernel, it just has support for the devices if it does detect them. which is basically the functionality you are asking for, ad-hoc device modules.
Monolithic kernels aren't "bad". That's subjective. Monolithic kernels have measurable and significant performance benefits, over micro kernels. You also gain a massive complexity reduction. Micro kernels, historically, have not been very successful, e.g. Hurd, because that complexity management is extremely difficult. Not impossible, but so far kernel development has favored monolithic kernels not without reason.
If what you say is actually that easy, why wouldn't all distro's just do that during the install, and during updates with their package managers? I believe you could do this in Gentoo, but I don't know if it has measurable benefits beyond what performance tuning for your specific CPU arch would give you. Since none of those devices you aren't running are consuming any resources beyond the storage space of the kernel.
"Their kernel is bloated" :D I dont compare with anything, as a linux distros job is pretty much to make me forget other ways to get "the linux stuff" because they are so good.
(Imagine how good Linux support would be if everyone would be on the same distro family like Fedora rawhide/stable/oldstable/centos-stream/almalinux;rockylinux;rhel.)
If that is true, and if the kernel will never load anything not needed for my device, then I am fine with it.
I see how monolithic is less complex and also a huge performance benefit over having the handshake between userspace and kernel space all the time (a meta dev on #techovertea talked about that).
But I would still want to debloat the kernel from unused code, as it is there somewhere and may get activated and used (why would you blocklist kernel modules otherwise?)
Also compiling for x86_64-v4 would probably improve speed, and it is rediculous to have the entire distro built for 20 years old hardware, neglecting all the improvements from over a decade.
It wouldn’t be too difficult(tm) to fork their kernel and make custom configs of it. Here’s the git repo that holds their rpms and their respective kernel configs, it’s just that nobody has cared enough to create/propose “slimmed down” specialized kernel images: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/kernel/tree/rawhide You can just clone the repo and point COPR to it, then automatically build custom kernels.
Awhile ago there was a proposal to move the x86 microarchitecture level. Here’s recent discussion on that proposal: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/what-happened-to-bumping-the-minimum-supported-architecture-from-x86-64-to-x86-64-v2/96787/2
In general, though, Fedora would not want to leave any users behind. Instead, the proposal for
hwcapsis currently being drafted: https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/3151 With hwcaps, default installs will be x86_64 v1, but will be upgraded to “optimized” packages if available upon updating. This makes packaging a bit awkward, though. Packagers already need to maintain packages for multiple versions of the distro. In fact, they need to support F38, F39, F40, and rawhide atm. Needing to maintain an extra 3 builds for each package on top of x86, x64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x is a bit of a burden, so success might be limited.Distrobox, while feature-rich, is still a bit hacky (though it’s still more reliable in my experience than toolbx). You’re not the first to want this, though: https://github.com/fedora-silverblue/issue-tracker/issues/440
Secureblue removes a good amount of unused kernel component, and even some useful ones like bluetooth and thunderbolts, but you can always manually enable them.
Yes thar is the direction I am going to. But they just disable kernel modules from running, I dont know if that is as complete as simply not building them.
But if its possible, then everyone with amd or intel should block nouveau, and vice versa. Just keep it small.
Yeah, this is the old philosophy of the "run anywhere" philosophy of linux (or computers in general) that got us here. Another problem with stripping down kernel drivers is that swapping hardware component will require rebuilding the kernel, which regular user will definitely not be happy about.
It would be a problem because of how it is currently done.
I imagine an install ISO to have a monokernel, build the kernel-building-system and detect the needed drivers. Save the config and build the matching kernel from that.
Now if you want to swap hardware, there is a transition tool within the OS that allows to state the wanted hardware component and remove the old driver from the config.
Or you switch to a monokernel and run the hardware detection and config change again.
Or you use the install USB stick (which you already have) which already uses a monokernel and has a feature to detect hardware, change the config on the OS, build and install the kernel to the OS.
This is a bit more complex than for example what fedora plans with their new WebUI installer. Poorly such a system also doesnt work that well with so many kernel updates.
I am not an expert, but I feel like rebuilding the kernel is probably too slow for most user.
And kernel already dynamically load the kernel module, then disabling them would practically make sure they will not be loaded.
I feel like we don't need to go down to micro-kernel to solve the problem of loading too many drivers.
What I really like about stuff like RedoxOS, COSMIC, typst, simpleX, Wayland and others is having stuff built from a modern perspective with modern practices.
Linux is ancient now, and its a miracle that it is thriving like this.
If dynamic loading really is that robust, it probably doesnt matter. But I dont know how big the performance increases are and I really need to do benchmarks before and after.
There are btw also some experiments on making tbe CentOS-Stream LTS kernel run on Fedora. Which would be another great way of getting a more stable system.
I’d really like it if Fedora didn’t discourage packaging static libs, but still discouraged building packages with static libs. It’d be nice to have them for development purposes.
I also wish they made “third party” software a bit easier to access in their installer and distro as a whole. The option to enable Nvidia drivers is buried, and even though flathub is now unrestricted when toggled in the installer, it’s not the first priority when prompted for software to install in gnome software.
A longer support cycle with less releases would also be nice, but would defeat the purpose of the distro. I guess it’d make more sense if CentOS Stream released more frequently and with more packages available in EPEL, similar to Ubuntu.
You just type Nvidia into Software. They’ll never promote it unfortunately.
Also you will need to setup secure boot in commandline, unless you are using ublue.
That's what I tried, it never showed up, even though the repo was enabled. Had to install it via terminal.
Everything from each other. Almost no distro will ever be extremely effective at doing anything that is literally impossible on any other distro.
You might like vanilla then. It has containers for each distro, I'm pretty sure.
If you want Debian but user-friendly, just use Mint, Debian is easy enough to install. It's like asking Gentoo or Arch to drop a easy installer, it would break the point of using it.
Gentoo and Arch do have easy installers (Arch via the Arch install script, Gentoo... Well, they provide stage 3 already built, a genkernel option, and even binary distribution now, which greatly simplifies the process)
Arch install is not official and it's not that stable, and what's the point of using Gentoo if you don't use the main reason to use it ?
Honestly, that one had me scratching my head too, I doubt I'd ever use the precompiled binaries on Gentoo myself
The stage 3 tarballs and genkernel, though, make an install that could take a week or more down to a few hours; having successfully built a system from a stage 1 with customized kernel, that's not an experience I feel a burning desire to go through again
It's a way to do, and yes it's not made for everyone. Currently im using vanilla Arch but i understand how great source installed Gentoo is
Would it detract from Debian if it had an installer which was more intuitive to new users? As long as they don't remove the options to configure, I see no harm, only benefits. To me, the thing about Debian is that it's a community. If a distro wants to be elitistic, sure, that's up to them, but I don't see Debian having that goal.
There's already an gui installer on Debian, what do you want ? The system to install himself without asking for your preferences ?
I don't know. It's difficult for me to answer because I'm so used to the Debian installer. But, for some reason the general opinion is that it's difficult for many compared to some other distros.
More difficult because Debian rely more on the terminal than mint. The terminal is not a accessorie like on Windows, it's part of basics Linux uses. In my opinion it's important to learn how to be familiar with
I think text based interfaces is a strength of unix-like systems, valuable tools to be used when the situation calls for it. It might be a lot to ask of new users to be familiar with terminals before they have even installed the system though. If Mint can get the same result with a GUI, I see no reason why Debian can't offer that option too, and let users discover bash and TUI when they have a working system.
When you're beginner it's normal to not be familiar with terminal, that's why i recommend Mint as a first distro. What im saying is that We already have Mint as a beginner-friendly distro, we don't need Debian to be as simple as Mint, also they included non-free firmware in their iso it's pretty enough imo.
You could check out Spiral Linux for an "easier" installer. It has the option to use the Calamares installer from the live USB instead of Debian's default. Also comes preloaded with back port repositories and, I think, Nvidia drivers.
I like that Spiral Linux is "plain" Debian, without extra repos. What I'm thinking is more along the lines of "why is Spiral Linux needed to begin with?" Sometimes downstream distros serve a niche function that warrants its own distribution, but sometimes I feel that if upstream improved, the need wouldn't be there to begin with.
Arch could use better standard MAC security applied to systemd units like Debian does.
Arch could have an easy few clicks installer, something like a default modern setup.
Live kernel patching.
archinstall script worked good for me, i installed arch on 2 kvm yesterday, i just filled blank this script offers and everything was done without me, only one advice, include your users in sudoers file as script doesn't do that automatically, also there's gentooinstall script derived from archinstall one
Not my current distro but I love ChimeraLinux, they manage to put musl and BSD userland into a working wonderful distro. I wish more distros adopted musl.
What I am really hoping catches on from Chimera is Turnstile: https://github.com/chimera-linux/turnstile
While I love that Chimera is Wayland only from the start ( no Xorg ), I do hope we get more DE options than just GNOME at some point.
Early days still for Chimera. I expect big things.
Alpine & OpenBSD with CLI installers, minimalism, lack of bloat and strong KISS philosophies, they remind me of what Arch Linux used to be -- I don't want any crapware if possible (dbus, systemd, polkit, logind etc). Just nice and simple.
The only one I have installed is dbus, unless you want to manually patch it out it's pretty much everywhere (Gentoo is nice for this).
Maybe you would like Void or Chimera
I've used Void over half a decade or so, runit is nice, but I think I like the Alpine ecosystem more, plus Void has some oddities to me.
For instance, in the repositories no forks of big projects like Librewolf instead of Firefox, no crytos like Monero, also xbps has both caps and non caps for naming for projects, it's nice to not have to use caps to install things. I know you can get around most of this with stuff like flatpak :)
I tried Chimera and liked it but again Alpine has a larger ecosystem, it's more established in that respect both from containers and router/server use.
I'm also pretty used to Alpine's quirks at this point, I've run it a quite a lot on my laptop with a funky DIY ZFS install and also run-from-RAM quite a lot on USBs. Having a stable branch is nice too, although I never really had many problems on Void either!
Debian used to uphold free software values. I'm not sure what its purpose is now.
Debian is a multipurpose I suppose
endeavourOs from arch by being less opinionated and giving away the awful colour theme
Luckily you can deselect the eos specific packages during install.
I totally agree with your assessment about Mint and Debian.
I like Debian's minimal approach, but I think minimal can also be user-friendly.
I still has a nice installer, though.
(Edit: Iirc)
Debian-variants on cmake. When I install cmake, it installs all libraries' cmake files without the libraries themselves. You read it right. The correct way to do this is to install only the base CMake files (Arch does this, and I guess all other distros). CMake configuration files for libraries should be packaged with the library (not CMake).
Whenever I use CMake, these distros can't show me the supposed error message. They just pretend configuration progressed and stop at random moments because some headers are missing. You see a compiler error, see missing headers, perhaps wonder if your install is outdated. Google it, and find out through Ubuntu SO that it's actually that a package is missing WTF. Without someone writing it on the web for all Debian packages, maybe you'd have never understood what's wrong!
I don't use Debian for C/C++ development anymore partially because it's so horrible.
I'm on Fedora Silverblue, which is great now, but when I installed it, I remember thinking that its installer was way less intuitive than Ubuntu's, and I think it also had fewer features (e.g. discovering existing operating systems and offering to install alongside it, IIRC?). I've seen screenshots of a new installer being in development, which looked like an improvement, but still not as smooth an experience as Ubuntu's.
I installed Fedora on a system for the first time a few weeks ago and had a generally positive impression of the installer, but I think it was still unable to detect the existing OS on the drive. It was fine because I was wiping it anyway, but I definitely got the impression that it's mainly designed for more simple use cases.
Is it cheating, if my workplace makes me use a worse distro and I list all the ways it's worse than my usual distro? 🙃
It's not cheating if your usual one is Arch
Well, then it is cheating.
It would also be kind of weird to compare to Arch, since Arch makes you configure so much yourself.
Like, my biggest complaint is that I feel extremely naked without automatic btrfs snapshots. Obviously, you could configure those on Arch, but that would require understanding significantly more about btrfs than I currently do.
How much does it help if you use only the bare minimum from the host OS and install Distrobox with the distro you like for everything else?
I had to read up on it just now, but I don't think, that works in my case.
So, the worse distro here is Kubuntu. Personally, I use openSUSE Tumbleweed.
My problems with Kubuntu are mainly:
And yeah, it seems like Distrobox is mainly useful for running CLI programs, maybe individual GUI apps, but not whole desktop environments. And it re-uses the filesystem of the host system, so that kind of precludes filesystem snapshots, too.
The Debian website is trash and I'm glad to see it acknowledged. People always take criticism of the website as if folks are saying it looks ugly. No. The layout is just icky.
It's difficult to find where to even download the thing, particularly if you're looking for older versions
YES! YES! This is exactly what I'm talking about.
I love the look of the Debian website.
I don't have a problem with the look, just the organization.
Definitely still has that directory web page feel surprised there isn't a visitor counter at the bottom
I think NixOS would stand to benefit a lot by taking inspiration from openSUSE's YaST system configuration tool. I think that if NixOS had a well supported graphical interface for creating and managing the system config, it would become so much more accessible to a very wide range of users who never would have given it a try otherwise, which in turn would bring in tons of new users and developers who will want to improve nixpkgs, etc.
NixOS with YaST support would indeed be an incredibly powerful setup. It would make the whole Nix ecosystem significantly more beginner friendly and even for someone who wants to be a poweruser. It would be really nice to have config options laid out for you in a UI. Most of the time I have to have the options search, and package search websites open because there's no easy way to get those lists within the console.
The universal operating system keeps dropping support for archs few people use... how universal, eh?
Ya, that bothers me too. Not enough to contribute time to prevent it though. So, I do not have much moral standing to complain.
@pmk If you want MINT just install it. Debian is upstream from MINT anyways. #LMDE
Well, I don't personally need the new user friendliness, I've used Debian for the last 10 years or so, but I do think it's an area we could be better.
whacks you with a rolled up newspaper No! Bad. Wrong.
There is a beauty to simplicity that's lost on so many. I can load a Debian wiki page over a dial-up connection at the south pole. The design is uncluttered and uncomplicated. That goes for every page on debian.org
I always took "universal" to be in the sense of "universal remote": it's not universally adopted, it's universally applicable. The fact that it's the upstream of so many major distros (including Mint) indicates that it's accomplished that.
Making it "new user" friendly necessarily requires restrictions and choices made by the maintainers for the ease of the users, which negates the "unversality."
I agree that there is beauty in simplicity. In my opinion, OpenBSD has the best website.
It's not about using fancy effects, it's about the sprawling logical layout and making it hard to navigate. It used to be better around 2005, when it had the left navigation index. I remember people said it was ugly then, but imho they changed the wrong aspects of it, removing the structure without adding simplicity.
For example, a new user reading this page https://l10n.debian.org/ will be confused. It only makes sense to me since I've already translated a bunch of debconf-po-files. These are my opinions, but you are welcome to disagree. Also, please don't hit people with rolled up newspapers, it's rude.
Alpine, by its use of
musloverglibcdoesn't support DNS over TLS because themuslcreator believes its better for user experience. It is in theory but if the other end uses it, you are out of luck and will likely spend days troubleshooting why one bit of software refuses to connect.Probably the start menu back to what it should be. Back with distro windows xp.
Wait no nvm wrong community.
Oh you can complain about both. Use WinXP-tc with XFCE to get a pixel perfect clone of the XP start menu. Then start complaining that distros are moving to Wayland where WinXP-tc won’t work.
Debian is so hecking unstable for me omg... For some reason it just doesn't play well with any hardware setup I've ever tried.
Anyways, I use arch Linux which could REALLY do with a nice wiki overhaul by now. It's not beginner friendly AT ALL! Been using the same install for almost 3 years now I think, but man... When I have to figure out something, the wiki isn't the first thing I'll go anymore.
EDIT: Why the downvotes?
The Arch Linux wiki has been the best source for information for a long time for me. Many years ago the Gentoo wiki was good as well, till they lost all content and had to start from scratch.
I use Debian but still use the Arch wiki quite often. It's a great resource. I improve Debian's wiki where I can (eg I wrote a few sections on this page: https://wiki.debian.org/NFSServerSetup) but it's just not the same.
What happened? Now you got me curious
Let's see. 15 years. Hosting company didn't pay the bills. All gone. No backups.
If the gentoo wiki did not exist back then I would probably not be as deep into linux as I am today. Insane loss that.
If Debian fails in the same predictable way every time, for the same reason, it could be argued that it's very stable, just not functional :) What kind of hardware do you use by the way?
It fails to run after a few days on several different laptops I've tried it on. Also on my main computer which is an amd 3900x with 64gb ram and a 3090. Arch however works perfectly fine, which is odd as heck
Maybe the kernel version on Debian lacks hardware support fixes?
That's like saying you don't get pyramids because they tip over so easily. It sounds like a you problem.
Lmao
Downvote because i like the arch wiki very much and it was beginner friendly enough for me, tho (installed arch as a noob recently)
(Well I did not really downvote to be honest, but if I did, that would be the reason)
Hm, weird. I tried following to wiki to fix some Bluetooth issues I had. It didn't fix my issue and on top of that it's all over the place.
Man, I feel like some people treat the wiki as a hecking Bible omg..
Hmm.. well.. I don’t know, I just almost every time find my solution there and generally I just google xxx arch linux using DDGO. 💁🏻♀️ maybe it’s not for every kind of person 🤔
Idk about instability but in my experience Debian always required the highest amount of work to fix and set up (on very different machines) compared to other distros smh