Examples could be things like specific configuration defaults or general decision-making in leadership.
What would you change?
I’d have Ubuntu stop forcing me to use Snaps.
Maybe you should switch your favourite then?
The enshittification of Ubuntu will not stop on an enforced Appstore.
honestly canonical has always been like this.
what do you suggest for an alternative thats similar to ubuntu?
The common recommendation is Linux Mint, but there are lots of Ubuntu derivatives out there. Another common recommendation is Debian or a Debian derivative, and those will generally be similar to Ubuntu since Debian is the upstream of Ubuntu.
You can feel free to ignore it if you aren’t open to other options, but my personal distro recommendation for a Gnome-based desktop is Fedora. It has a much quicker update cycle, so you’ll actually get feature updates on your packages (which is great if you use neovim plugins, since the neovim packages in the Ubuntu repos are ancient at this point, or you know, any other package that benefits from being updated). Of course it obviously isn’t as bleeding edge as Arch, though I personally see that as a benefit because I found Arch to be unstable (haven’t really experienced any instability with Fedora in the past few years though). But don’t be mistaken, I’m not saying Fedora is similar to Ubuntu, just providing an alternative perspective since you seem to be open to switching to a different distro (though the differences may be more minor than you think from an end-user perspective).
BTW, Linux Mint isn’t just a “beginner distro”, it’s perfectly fine for anyone to use, and it fixes a lot of the Canonical BS from Ubuntu. I feel like some people get caught up in the thought that Mint is the distro that you ditch for another one when you become more comfortable with Linux, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
Going upstream to Debian
There where Times when Ubuntu was Marks baby, but nowadays with pro, advertisement and tracking in the terminal an AppStore, everything has to have a businesscase.
I would recommend just plain Debian either with flatpak or in the testing branch. It’s almost the same, stable as a rock and driven by a community.
if i understand correctly the testing branch is similar to ubuntu non-lts?
Somewhat but it is a rolling release. Packages will be major-updated constantly.
is it stable?
Yes it runs quite stable. But the packages and their configuration can change.
If you’re looking for something more conservative, the stable branch fits better but on a desktop it’s very old (like an Ubuntu lts)
Remove snaps
I like how this comment didn’t even need to mention the distro name ##### ubuntu
hahaha! I almost put Ubuntu, but I knew everyone would know exactly what I was talking about.
Arch should have the same zsh profile you have on the live image, installed after the installation by default.
Arch doesn’t have zsh installed by default. In case people wanted this profile - it’s in extra
grml-zsh-config.grml-zsh-configis its name, and it’s always one of the first things I install on a fresh system. I’ll never understand why it isn’t the default.
Stop using GNOME as de facto default standard. Fr I despise this crap
I seriously don’t understand how anyone from windows is going to find stock GNOME even remotely intuitive or useful.
What kind of sick bastard thought “Yeah you know what, people don’t need minimize and expand buttons.”
And then on top of that, they put in the most basic default modern android chromeos looking shell/menu as if this is some mobile OS that runs all its apps on the JVM and that everyone knows trackpad kung fu.
For such a “simple” desktop, it eats through ram like it’s KDE with all the fancy animations enabled.
Frickin Compiz solved the problem of performance and features over a decade ago. Use the god damn thing. If you need wayland, then at least KDE please.
If you’re coming from Mac, only then will GNOME feel somewhat familiar because of the shell. Otherwise, please just make the download either an ISO with several DEs or a menu to select the DE first. Or at the very least, make a better default GNOME setup.
Gnome is literally the only usable DE right now
Gnome is incredibly annoying to use for me. KDE is so much better.
If that’s true, it’s very good we use a wm.
I seriously don’t understand how anyone from windows is going to find stock GNOME even remotely intuitive or useful.
GNOME is a very easy transition from MacOS, however. There are even themes to make it almost indistinguishable.
The truly awful one is “default the cursor on the save dialog to the Search input box, NOT the filename box”. I install Gnome every once in a while to check it out, and the second I encounter that dialog still behaving like that, I rip the whole marianne right out.
Like what insane monster thinks that’s reasonable?
Kde doesn’t use much ram. It hasn’t done so for ages.
You made me chuckle :) True, if coming from macOS, Gnome can be familiar enough but the defaults are terrible. Even those used to Macs need to install/enable the basics like maximise/minimise buttons etc. I don’t understand why even a Gnome centric distro like Fedora doesn’t come with Gnome Tweaks installed by default… Let alone the fact that usually the average user will also install a bunch of extensions. That is why Ubuntu is arguably the one doing the better job out of the box: their Gnome is actually useful from the get go.
You didn’t even mention the worst part, you can’t change the default terminal emulator.
I do like gnome for how out of the way it stays. It’s easy for new users to understand its lack of distractions and start to actually just use software on it. It’s got its target audience.
I’m not saying it can’t be done better. Cinnamon, my current personal choice, does most of the same things right.
I haven’t used KDE much because of graphical issues on my device, but it seems like a nightmare getting workspaces or gestures set up. It seems like the polar opposite of ‘distractionless’, where you can spend hours learning and/or getting lost in a maze of submenus. I understand that’s an appeal to some.
I want to love KDE, and I might retry sometime soon, but as a casual it does make me appreciate what gnome is doing.
True true, plasma the default or XFCE like is used on Mint would be way better
Some defaults I would like to see:
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Have zsh as the interactive shell (And also have its dotfiles in a better location like XDG_CONFIG_HOME/zsh)
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Btrfs with compression enabled and subvolumes set. (Maybe also timeshift installed, not sure because not everyone uses timeshift for btrfs snapshots).
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ZRAM (With proper sysctl.conf like PopOS does).
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Pacman as the package manager with an Aur helper already installed.
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No bloat™ preinstalled, nothing of shipping flatpak or snap by default or even a DE. So I can just boot into a tty without having to do the minimal install from zero.
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Comply with the FHS and XDG specs (Arch fucking installs packages to /opt and doesnt set ~/.local/bin as part of PATH)
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Dont break userspace (arch did this recently with an update to glibc that removed a patch that breaks steam games)
Edit: Also forgot to mention:
- Ship x86-64 v3 binaries, common arch, even Gentoo is doing it while on arch you have to use non official repos.
If you don’t want ANYTHING installed by default you should probably just go for the specialized distros that provide that.
The issue with many of those distros is that it usually means that you have to install everything from 0.
Arch is good at this because the archinstall script speeds it up and you don’t have to choose a DE. But with other distros that use a graphical installer, you are forced to use whatever they ship as the default desktop environment.
edit: And holy shit properly configuring Btrfs subvolumes from 0 is something that I tried with voidlinux and I ended up breaking the entire install.
Btrfs with compression enabled and subvolumes set.
And enable/automate maintenance services for BTRFS. For example:
balaceshould be run on heavily used system disks orscrubcould help detect errors even on single disks.ZRAM (With proper sysctl.conf like PopOS does).
Could you explain the preference of ZRAM over ZSWAP? I thought the latter was the more advanced and better performing solution. Is there some magic in Pop’s config?
It is just that zram is much faster than zswap because it uses the ram to store compressed memory. Android already uses it by default.
These are worth reading:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/mzun99/new_zram_tuning_benchmarks/ https://linuxreviews.org/The_Benefits_Of_Having_A_Compressed_zram_Swap_Device_On_Linux
Thanks for the links! I updated my config from z3fold to zsmalloc and adjusted the vm.page-cluster to test these out.
Reading a bit more, I think when using large max_pool_percent (>30) with Zswap the two solutions are more similar than not. A crucial difference is what use-case is more acceptable since Zswap can cause unresponsiveness (and potential lockup) under high memory pressure. While Zram could result in an OOM crash in a similar worst-case scenario.
Oh I can tell you that zram will not result in an OOM that zswap would prevent:
I once ran into a bug when using foobar2000 with wine to convert my music library that resulted in an insanely high ram usage, like my 16 GIB ram was filled and then my 32 GIB zram was also filled and the PC froze.
I just went and edited my zram config to make my zram 48GIB and ran foobar again, it ended the conversion without issue kek. No idea wtf happened but whatever data was being written in memory was being compressed good by zRAM, like very few people would even use a swap partition or file that is more than 32 GIB to begin with.
I also tested running Zelda tears of the kingdom in yuzu using 4GiB of ram with a big zram and it worked, that game in yuzu is a ramhog and on windows people need 16 GiB of ram and they still max out their swapfile.
There is also a vid on yt titled zram vs windows pagefile where a user running endevour demostrates how zram can take a bunch of Minecraft mods while windows with the help its of pagefile cant
Edit: Here is the vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMYTBsjeoTc
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I think the biggest flaw in Arch is the “keyring” package that can go out of date between updates. EndeavourOS makes it worse since it has two of them.
EndeavourOS ships eos-update that somewhat fixes this and can be used in place of pacman or yay. It always updates the keyring first. How many people use that utility though ( or even know it exists ).
Pacman and yay should “just work”.
It’s fixed by now I think ; I never update between projects, so sometimes would go a few months between updates and it hasn’t happen anymore. When it did, the fix was simple enough while still annoying of course.
AFAIK now the keyring gets updated first if needed. In the middle of something here, can’t try unfortunately - but at the time of the issue, while the first-level answer was “Update All The Things (all the time)”, the problem was on the table, and acknowledged as in need of a fix.
pacman and nix are both really neat conceptually but they both fail at the most obvious usability test, which is “I just want to install a package”; its like exiting vim all over again.
edit: yes, I know you can set an alias to
pacman -Syor whatever, but if you need to set up an alias for a command to be usable, then I can’t in good faith recommend that OS to anyone, and I don’t want to use an OS I wouldn’t recommend to others.What’s complex about pacman? I’ve found pacman to be more reliable and easier to manage than apt, so I’m just curious about your experience
My experience with pacman was via rwfus on steam deck. I was coming in as someone with experience with apt, npm, pip, even choco and winget on windows. My expectation from pretty much every other command line tool is that commands are verbs, flags are adverbs. So having to install with “pacman -S” (or is it “pacman -Sy”?) just feels unnecessarily cryptic. Same with “nix-env -iA”. I understand that there are some clever internals going on under the hood, but you can have clever internals and sane defaults. For instance, “npm install foo” both downloads the package to node_modules and updates package.json for me, so I can see what change was made to my environment. Nix should do that.
Yeah, I don’t understand how you could make installing vim simpler than
pacman -S vim? Is it about “-S” being less obvious than “install”?I’ve also seen it as
pacman -Syandpacman -Syuand so on. I really just think “install” should be a subcommand, not a flag. That’s really my only issue I guess, I’ve only ever used pacman via rwfus on steam deck so maybe my usability problem is with that.
Every distro.
Samba file shares should use regular user credentials and not have separate samba usernames and passwords.
If it really bothers you, I think you could set up authentik (or some other idp) and point all your login needs at it… Though, it’s not going to make things easier for you, just the opposite. Probably a good learning experience though.
I would get rid of snaps.
You just inadvertently triggered a lot of Scandinavians
As someone who’s an active user and contributor to Fedora: words cannot express enough how much I hate US laws.
It’s the reason we can’t ship with H.264 hardware decoding out of the box, it’s the reason why we can’t provide access to our project and our community to sanctioned countries (Cuba being one that really hurts me, but mainly Iran right now, which makes me really sad because I’m having to answer people from Iran almost weekly asking on how they can be a part of the project with “unfortunately you can’t”).
I dream of a day where Fedora’s trademark changed to the hands of a non-profit foundation outside of the US.
Responses involving, “Did you typo when you said you were from Tehran, Iran? Sometimes autocorrect changes it from sanctioned [foreign capital, foreign nation] - as we both surely know [foreign nation] is sanctioned allowing contributions to US based software projects. Anyway, check out the Git!” are probably forbidden, surely.
Do other distributions like Debian, Alpine, or Arch also have this issue?
I believe some other distros have this issue, but I’m not sure about specific ones. US laws are pretty complicated by themselves, even more when you try to understand how it affects projects from other countries that are trying to be available on US.
No snaps or flatpak by default.
I wish Debian picks KDE instead of GNOME as their default DE on the instalation menu. GNOME is so ill-fitted for point release due to its bleeding-edge nature. It works well with Fedora because the distro itself is bleeding-edge (same goes with Arch & Nix).
(Arch, btw)
Technical: Better, easier to use APIs for pacman. The last time I tried to do alpm stuff, it wasn’t fun.
Social: Less rtfm. The manual is good, but it’s not cool when people are super elitist (especially towards newbies).
Not just for arch but the community in general is also really quick to suggest you change the technology you’re using.
I’ve had a couple occasions before where I’ve mentioned a problem and people immediately tell me to use their window manager of choice instead because it’s better
The manual is OK, much of it’s out dated and often outright wrong. It is still a great document.
Edits to the wiki are often knocked back if they weren’t made by the inner circle, discussions on the back page are often closed and frankly the TUs are mostly wankers. The forum policy on necro-bumping leaves half answers everywhere but the notion of “put it in the wiki” is undermined by the toxic community among inner party members.
Arch is a great middle ground between Fedora and Gentoo, but I had to walk away because the community was so toxic and childish.
I’m using void and Gentoo now and I’m pretty happy, anything that doesn’t run works in a container anyway.
TL;DR: community behaviour is much more important to me than technical use.
Unpopular take: A more complex installer that lets me choose what I want to use:
- what de?
- what theme of de?
- what package manager?
- all the video codecs or minimal?
- what office programs?
- graphics card? Nvidia or AMD?
- developer pack? (Python, java, some other stuff, vscode/codium)
- graphics suite (Krita, incscape, gimp)
- KDE connect, syncthing?
- Firefox or chromium?
- cloud connections? (OneDrive, Google drive, nextcloud?)
I don’t know what else could be interesting, but I think that would take away the annoying “what distro to I want” and would make Linux more like “I like gnome, everything installed, I’m a developer” or “KDE plasma, graphics and office, the rest inwant to install myself”
Maybe I totally don’t understand what distros are, but isn’t all the same, just some differen configurations?
Arch?
I haven’t used any of the arch install scripts but they seem to have regular problems. Doing it the usual way is a proper way to roll your own but it doesn’t give you options. You have to know what you want, or you have to know where to find out what exists.
The guided installer is going to be important to a type of person we’re going to see more and more of: power users that know what they want to do, but for whom the Linux ecosystem is a foreign and fractous entity what uses entirely unfamiliar nomenclature.
I believe that Debian Unstable has you covered
/j
I’d just want more package maintainers for Arch, some people maintaining 1000+ packages is crazy and would take a load off of them.
