this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024

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What could your distro learn from another distro? (lemmy.sdf.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

208 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (14 children)

Fedora Atomic Desktop, mainly KDE.

Fedora adds their pretty useless Fedora Flatpak repo, that is more secure but has unofficial packages, an additional runtime in RAM and a very small set of apps (they need it due to "legal problems" when preinstalling apps. Like... just dont preinstall them but add a startup page to install them manually?)
There is no good way to use NVIDIA as it needs proprietary drivers and some tweaks. Ublue fixes that. Same with other out-of-tree stuff. Not really their fault, but be aware that atomic Fedora has basically no proprietary NVIDIA driver support.
i think their kernel is extremely bloated, I would prefer having separate ones for only intel, amd, nouveau and also removing all the legacy hardware drivers nobody uses
an x86_64-v4 (or at least v3) variant would be really necessary (my 2012 Thinkpad is v3)
they will likely prefer to use flatpak firefox, just like ublue does, ignoring the inability to sandbox processes at all. This is the list of issues that need solving until Firefox "can be shipped as flatpak"
they use toolbx (with that silly rename from "toolbox") instead of distrobox. Distrobox has way more critical features like a separate home, which prevents breakages through conflicting dotfiles. Toolbx is the worse product.

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.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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? 🙃

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 116 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

Every distro could learn from Arch Wiki

[–] [email protected] 63 points 1 year ago

Even Arch Linux could learn from the Arch Wiki.

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 83 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (12 children)

All distros, or none: flatpak has to improve in regards to launching an app from terminal. Following is a joke:

flatpak run com.github.iwalton3.jellyfin-media-player

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

This is extremely simple to fix with scripts that can be automatically created on install time. Here is a quick script I just wrote. It will search for first matching app and run it. Just save the script as flatrun, give it executable bit and put it into $PATH. Run it as like this: flatrun freetube

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# flatrun e
# flatrun freetube

if [ "${#}" -eq 0 ]; then
	flatpak list --app --columns=name,application
else
	app="$(
		flatpak list --app --columns=name,application |
			grep -i -F "${@}" |
			awk -F'\t' '{print $2}'
	)"

	if [ -z "${app}" ]; then
		flatpak list --app --columns=name,application
	elif [[ "$(echo "${app}" | wc -l)" -gt 1 ]]; then
		echo "${app}"
	else
		flatpak run "${app}"
	fi
fi

Edit: Just updated the script to output the list of matching apps, if it matches more than one.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's super. Thanks for sharing.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Yes and I did a similar script but "just create a script" is a really bad solution.

Apps should need to declare a shortname and flatpak should have a shortcut for those with a separated command like flatrun.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I personally don't think that creating a script is a bad solution. The entire Linux eco system is based around composable components (especially when we talk about terminal commands). Most of the Flatpak applications are available through GUI menus (.desktop files) and that's the focus of Flatpak. And I think it's a design decision not to expose every application as a separate program in the $PATH by default. This way there is less of a chance to collide with anything random on the system, if they have the same name.

Having said this, I still agree it would be beneficial for most users if there was a way to automatically create scripts in a special bin folder, that is available in the $PATH. The problem is, what application name should it have? What about different versions of the same program? The entire Flatpak concept was not designed for this, so creating a script for your personal use is not a bad solution.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It would be pretty neat if they did like zsh does, where it asks you if you mean a certain command when you only type it partially.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Why can’t the installation create aliases like

flatpak run jellyfin-media-player ? And then highlight conflicts during?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

It would also be nice if it could alias to the normal command, for example, LibreOffice with CLI commands like lowriter or localc.

Did you know you can evoke LibreOffice from the terminal to convert one file format to another? It can do what Pandoc does, but also works on old .doc files. Flatpak's weird CLI behavior makes it difficult to use though.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ask the devs. I haven't bothered asking so far. There's fp https://github.com/DLopezJr/fp but I don't like workaround if it's easily fixed upstream and it's not like they wouldn't know that it's bullshit. Maybe they can't decide upon a solution. Or are waiting for another important and relevant update.

Edit: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/994

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Probably the start menu back to what it should be. Back with distro windows xp.

Wait no nvm wrong community.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Slackware - if it ain't broken don't fix it. Gentoo - USE flags. Mint - user-friendly.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Slackware is broken, though.

Its releases are so far apart that the default installer stops working in between releases cause it can't handle the changes to the repos.
Its default software selection is outdated, makes no sense (multiple tools for the same task), and is grouped illogically. If I want to run Xfce, I shouldn't have to install the KDE group to satisfy necessary dependencies. If I install the base group, all dependencies for using the package manager should be satisified. And Libreoffice shouldn't be installable only via an unofficial, unsupported third party repo.
Its documentation is so outdated it isn't useful anymore:
https://docs.slackware.com/howtos:slackware_admin:installing_on_uefi_hardware

"Some modern computers have started to offer motherboards that use Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) as a replacement for the traditional BIOS."

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don't use it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I did use it for a while, then switched to something else.
Still have a soft spot for it in my heart, I just wish they'd modernize a little.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The universal operating system keeps dropping support for archs few people use... how universal, eh?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Ya, that bothers me too. Not enough to contribute time to prevent it though. So, I do not have much moral standing to complain.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Gentoo - patience.
But seriously. With the USE flags, 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 configure options. With a binary package you have no control.

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