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.

    •  lemmyvore   ( @lemmyvore@feddit.nl ) English
      10•3 months ago

      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.

      •  N0x0n   ( @N0x0n@lemmy.ml ) 
        9•3 months ago

        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 !!!

  •  Björn Tantau   ( @bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ) 
    37•3 months ago

    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.

    •  teawrecks   ( @teawrecks@sopuli.xyz ) 
      15•3 months ago

      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”.

      •  BCsven   ( @BCsven@lemmy.ca ) 
        4•3 months ago

        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.

          •  BCsven   ( @BCsven@lemmy.ca ) 
            4•3 months ago

            Each one has good parts, but I think openSUSE did a lot to make things easier for new users to linux

            • Install, you see software summary, you can click and alter what patterns or packages you want included.
            • auto snapshots when you enter package manager or admin tools, easy rollback with snapper or boot list
            • a GTK front for all of YAST2-GUI components. All system, network, firewall, service, packages, boot and kernel config are available as GUI dialogs (as well as many others)
  •  lnxtx   ( @lnxtx@feddit.nl ) English
    16•3 months ago

    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.

    •  GenderNeutralBro   ( @GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
      5•3 months ago

      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.

      •  lemmyreader   ( @lemmyreader@lemmy.ml ) English
        3•3 months ago

        The Debian web site needs a good UX overhaul. 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 ?

        •  GenderNeutralBro   ( @GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
          5•3 months ago

          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.

          •  lemmyreader   ( @lemmyreader@lemmy.ml ) English
            3•3 months ago

            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.

            •  GenderNeutralBro   ( @GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
              4•3 months ago

              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).

              •  lemmyreader   ( @lemmyreader@lemmy.ml ) English
                3•3 months ago

                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/ ;-)

  •  rollingflower   ( @rollingflower@lemmy.kde.social ) Deutsch
    9•3 months ago

    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.

    •  meteokr   ( @meteokr@community.adiquaints.moe ) 
      4•3 months ago

      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.

      •  rollingflower   ( @rollingflower@lemmy.kde.social ) Deutsch
        1•3 months ago

        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-devel which has all the sources.

        You can use make menuconfig and 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.

        •  corsicanguppy   ( @corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ) 
          3•3 months ago

          Building the kernel is not that hard, as you have kernel-devel which has all the sources.

          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.

        •  meteokr   ( @meteokr@community.adiquaints.moe ) 
          1•3 months ago

          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.

          •  rollingflower   ( @rollingflower@lemmy.kde.social ) Deutsch
            1•3 months ago

            “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.)

            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.

            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.

    •  biribiri11   ( @biribiri11@lemmy.ml ) 
      3•3 months ago

      It wouldn’t be too difficult™ 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 hwcaps is 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

      •  rollingflower   ( @rollingflower@lemmy.kde.social ) Deutsch
        2•3 months ago

        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.

        •  baseless_discourse   ( @baseless_discourse@mander.xyz ) 
          2•3 months ago

          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.

          •  rollingflower   ( @rollingflower@lemmy.kde.social ) Deutsch
            2•3 months ago

            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.

            •  baseless_discourse   ( @baseless_discourse@mander.xyz ) 
              1•3 months ago

              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.

              •  rollingflower   ( @rollingflower@lemmy.kde.social ) Deutsch
                2•3 months ago

                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.

  •  Yuki   ( @Yuki@kutsuya.dev ) 
    7•3 months ago

    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?

  •  3w0   ( @3w0@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
    6•3 months ago

    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).

      •  3w0   ( @3w0@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
        1•3 months ago

        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!

  •  Titou   ( @Titou@feddit.de ) 
    6•3 months ago

    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.

        •  laurelraven   ( @laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
          1•3 months ago

          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

          •  Titou   ( @Titou@feddit.de ) 
            1•3 months ago

            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

    •  pmk   ( @pmk@lemmy.sdf.org ) OP
      2•3 months ago

      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.

      •  Sterling   ( @Sterling@lemmy.one ) 
        3•3 months ago

        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.

        •  pmk   ( @pmk@lemmy.sdf.org ) OP
          1•3 months ago

          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.

        •  pmk   ( @pmk@lemmy.sdf.org ) OP
          1•3 months ago

          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.

          •  Titou   ( @Titou@feddit.de ) 
            1•3 months ago

            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

            •  pmk   ( @pmk@lemmy.sdf.org ) OP
              1•3 months ago

              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.

              •  Titou   ( @Titou@feddit.de ) 
                1•3 months ago

                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.

  •  biribiri11   ( @biribiri11@lemmy.ml ) 
    6•3 months ago

    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.

  •  LeFantome   ( @LeFantome@programming.dev ) 
    6•3 months ago

    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.