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.

5 points

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.

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1 point

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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1 point

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.”

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1 point

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.

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2 points

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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6 points
*

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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2 points

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

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1 point

Secureblue removes a good amount of unused kernel component, and even some useful ones like bluetooth and thunderbolts, but you can always manually enable them.

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2 points

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.

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2 points
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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.

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