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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
