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.

BaumGeist ,

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."

pmk OP ,

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.

CatTrickery ,

Alpine, by its use of musl over glibc doesn't support DNS over TLS because the musl creator 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.

sepulcher ,

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.

JackbyDev , (edited )

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.

LunarLoony ,
@LunarLoony@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

It's difficult to find where to even download the thing, particularly if you're looking for older versions

JackbyDev ,

YES! YES! This is exactly what I'm talking about.

sepulcher ,

I love the look of the Debian website.

JackbyDev ,

I don't have a problem with the look, just the organization.

sirico ,
@sirico@feddit.uk avatar

Definitely still has that directory web page feel surprised there isn't a visitor counter at the bottom

3w0 ,

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).

LeFantome ,

Maybe you would like Void or Chimera

3w0 ,

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 ,

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.

pmk OP ,

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 ,

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 OP ,

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.

Titou ,

There's already an gui installer on Debian, what do you want ? The system to install himself without asking for your preferences ?

pmk OP ,

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 ,

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 OP ,

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 ,

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.

laurelraven ,

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)

Titou ,

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 ?

laurelraven ,

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 ,

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

TheGrandNagus ,

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.

NoisyFlake ,

Why won't they just use Calamares?

biribiri11 ,

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.

domi ,

Fedora’s installer is abysmal.

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.

Enabling access to proprietary software should also install audio/video codecs.

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.

baseless_discourse ,

Fortunately many flatpak browser now comes with codecs, like ungoogled chromium and librewolf.

penquin ,

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

Vincent ,

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.

YaBoyMax ,

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.

femboy_bird ,
@femboy_bird@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I think more distros should have an easy way to set up disk level encryption in the installation

teawrecks ,

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 , (edited )

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.

teawrecks ,

Great, there we go, sounds like all distros should learn from OpenSUSE.

BCsven ,

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)
Sophocles ,

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.

biribiri11 ,

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.

AProfessional ,

The option to enable Nvidia drivers is buried

You just type Nvidia into Software. They’ll never promote it unfortunately.

baseless_discourse ,

Also you will need to setup secure boot in commandline, unless you are using ublue.

NoisyFlake ,

That's what I tried, it never showed up, even though the repo was enabled. Had to install it via terminal.

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

Debian used to uphold free software values. I'm not sure what its purpose is now.

Debian is a multipurpose I suppose

StephenTallentyre ,
@StephenTallentyre@lemmy.today avatar

Everything from each other. Almost no distro will ever be extremely effective at doing anything that is literally impossible on any other distro.

machineLearner ,

You might like vanilla then. It has containers for each distro, I'm pretty sure.

Kuvwert ,

Just installed Debian today. Jesus the site/wiki is ugly

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

What's wrong with it?

OsrsNeedsF2P ,

I mean... Gestures vaguely

Debian wiki screenshot

Epzillon ,

What do you mean, I'm a web dev and that looks completely normal.

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

Its missing tons of images, CSS and unnecessary frameworks. So no, it is not normal

atzanteol ,

I don't even see any video or infinite-scrolling pages.

pmk OP ,

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/

YaBoyMax ,

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.

pmk OP ,

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?

Epzillon ,

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.

Alsephina ,

You probably shouldn't be accessing a linux distro's website from mobile but yeah the site does look weird and amateur

https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/848a576c-be70-41c2-b1ac-ebe9f7bd5667.png

caseyweederman ,

Yeah, just curl it into aplay like the rest of us, jeez

Revan343 ,

You probably shouldn't be accessing a linux distro's website from mobile

Well how else am I going to access it, I borked my computer mid-install :P

JackbyDev ,

No excuse for websites that render poorly on mobile nowadays.

sepulcher ,

Looks fine to me.

kryllic ,
@kryllic@programming.dev avatar

You probably shouldn't be accessing a linux distro's website from mobile

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.

LemmyHead ,

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.

bruhduh ,
@bruhduh@lemmy.world avatar

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

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