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.

  • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
    0·
    6 months ago

    I also think we could learn website design from… looks at notes …everyone else.

    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 often see Mint recommended to new users, but rarely Debian, which has a goal to be “the universal operating system”.

    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.”

  • LeFantome@programming.dev
    0·
    6 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.

    • lemmyvore@feddit.nlEnglish
      0·
      6 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@lemmy.ml
        0·
        6 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 !!!

  • dotslashme@infosec.pubEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    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.

  • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    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.

  • thezeesystem@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

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

    Wait no nvm wrong community.

  • eveninghere@beehaw.org
    0·
    6 months ago

    Debian-variants on cmake. When I install cmake, it installs all libraries’ cmake files without the library binaries themselves. You read it right. The correct way to do this is to install only the base CMake files. 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 binaries are missing.

  • witx@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    6 months ago

    endeavourOs from arch by being less opinionated and giving away the awful colour theme

  • Björn Tantau@swg-empire.de
    0·
    6 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.

    • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
      0·
      6 months ago

      Pacman just dumps you a .pacnew or .pacsave, leaving the comparison to you (y’know, KISS). Your change isn’t touched.

    • Oisteink@feddit.nl
      0·
      6 months ago

      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

      • taladar@sh.itjust.works
        0·
        6 months ago

        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.

        • dan@upvote.au
          0·
          6 months ago

          the entire package system shits itself

          Usually just the one package fails, unless you have other packages that have a dependency on it. I agree that it’s annoying though.

            • Oisteink@feddit.nl
              0·
              6 months ago

              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

  • Pacmanlives@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    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

    • NaN@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      Possible in Debian. The SpiralLinux guy (who also made Gecko Linux) has it set up on install.

  • Ephera@lemmy.ml
    0·
    6 months ago

    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? 🙃

    • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      0·
      6 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@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        6 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@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
          0·
          6 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@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            6 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@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
              0·
              6 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@lemmy.mlEnglish
                0·
                6 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/ ;-)

  • lnxtx@feddit.nlEnglish
    0·
    6 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.

    • Simmy@lemmygrad.ml
      0·
      6 months ago

      How are those new binary applications coming along? is it feasible to mix. I don’t want to compile everything.

      • lnxtx@feddit.nlEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        Quite useful if you don’t mess with the USE. I can be mixed.
        I recently tested the binary option, I set desired profile (eselect profile list) and it just worked™.
        Some applications still require manual compilation, e.g. llvm, gcc, systemd.

  • 0x0@programming.dev
    0·
    6 months ago

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

    • KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 months ago

      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.”