What would you change about your favorite Linux distribution?

I'd have Ubuntu stop forcing me to use Snaps.

Desktop environment should be separated from the OS. You should be able to change the de easily. Maybe in a container.

Present the user with common software when installing the os. Ask the user if she wants to install any of it (as a flatpak).

Ask for prioprietary codecs and install them if wanted.

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.

Some defaults I would like to see:

• Have zsh as the interactive shell (And also have its dotfiles in a better location like XDG_CONFIG_HOME/zsh)

• Btrfs with compression enabled and subvolumes set. (Maybe also timeshift installed, not sure because not everyone uses timeshift for btrfs snapshots).

• ZRAM (With proper sysctl.conf like PopOS does).

• Pacman as the package manager with an Aur helper already installed.

• 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.

• Comply with the FHS and XDG specs (Arch fucking installs packages to /opt and doesnt set ~/.local/bin as part of PATH)

• 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.

Arch should have the same zsh profile you have on the live image, installed after the installation by default.

Fedora:

• Put H264 and H265 hardware video decoding back in
• Make Flathub the default Flatpak repository
• Make the installer easier for beginners by hiding advanced settings most won't need
• Make their KDE spin more prominent, currently you have to look for it to find it

Remove snaps

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).

Just in general: More sane defaults, less RTFM. Sure, you can configure everything, but MUST you? A lot of opensource developers seem to believe that configurability is a get-out-of-jail-free card for having to provide a good user experience out of the box.

I would change the name to drugs.

I use drugs btw.

Debian

• Say the current stable and testing version number and name clearly on the web front page. Actually put it on every single page instead of burying it somewhere. It takes no space at all and is stupidly hard to find of you're ootl.
• Nicer installer. Make sure images with WiFi drivers and firmware are easy to find.

Also I wish every distribution had a wiki as nice as Arch's.

It would be cool if it officially brought back KDE Plasma.
(Linux Mint)

I'd just want more package maintainers for Arch, some people maintaining 1000+ packages is crazy and would take a load off of them.

I would get rid of snaps.

The documentation. It needs more of it.

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.

No snaps or flatpak by default.

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 -Sy or 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.

(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).

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”.

I tried to think very hard for OpenSuse TW but there honestly is nothing, other than maybe not shipping duplicate apps (e.g. two camera apps) with the ISO.

I would have Debian go back in time to 1999 and adopt Window Maker as it's default DE. GNUstep would be integrated and made cross platform. All popular software on windows, Mac and Linux would be based off of it. We'd be used to lightning fast, beautiful DE, with an auto docking paradigm. World peace and the end of hunger would be achieved.

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?

Every distro.

Samba file shares should use regular user credentials and not have separate samba usernames and passwords.

A better way to uninstall software.

While I've been re-learning my way around Mint, I've found that some software doesn't show up in the GUI package manager. Removing it with Apt doesn't give the option to remove dependencies or optional extras by default, you have to do it manually. Installing something from Github has to be done separately.

Even if it's an optional extra, some software that monitors installations and cleanly uninstalls them would be handy :)

Linux Mint - More up to date packages. Especially the kernel.

Fedora:

-Window tiling without an extension -Ability to open a program on a certain workspace without an extension -An equivalent to Time Machine -Minimizing/expending buttons by default -Gnome calendar easily displaying your thunderbird calendar -Ability to easily try other DE

Otherwise everything is perfectly fine

bootloaders should always be packaged with a pacman hook

I’d like a vanilla, stable, rolling release. Fedora is close but I’d like a “clean slate” option where you have the desktop environment, package manager, and expected hardware functionality like sound, Bluetooth, etc. But then as few extras as possible so I can choose my own adventure.

And by stable rolling release, I just mean that most rolling release options are for beta testing. I totally get the reasons for that but while we’re wishing for things, I’d like a rolling release that was almost as conservative as an LTS release. I doubt that’s realistic but a feller can dream.

Like u/lukmyly013 said, I'd love an official KDE version to mint. It isn't that hard to get going, and I like cinnamon well enough on most things, but there are a few situations where I'd like to have plasma out of the box

Have A zsh shell with fzf history and zsh syntax highlighting installed

Package manager like yay for the community packages of openSuse tumbleweed.

Mint - Firstly Wayland support, but that's been said before.

But one small annoyance is that they ship with a version of synaptic in the repos that doesn't allow software upgrades. The reason for this is that they want you to go through their update manager (which doesn't work for me, but eh). But seriously, for an OS and ecosystem which is supposed to be pro-user agency, why arbitrarily restrict people like that? I end up having to pin a specific version of it.

Debian (testing branch): Add normal firefox to the repo. Firefox ESR is total bullshit that makes zero sense to use. I always install it either as flatpak or from the unstable repos using apt-pinning (which works great though!)

For Arch Linux:

• support a different process supervisor
  • dinit, or
  • s6 with some high level sugar
• don't use Bash anywhere
  • port down to POSIX, and
  • port up to Zsh
  • port minimal launchers to execline
• replace PKGBUILD format, maybe with
  • nearly identical but Zsh
  • NestedText containing Zsh snippets
    • use this to render Zsh based on templates
      • my favorite template engine: wheezy.template
• build packages with more optimizations, like the CachyOS repos
• include or endorse something like aconfmgr
• port conf files to NestedText

EndeavourOS:

• Install portals along with Flatpak, depending on DE (+ GTK, always)
• btrfs + assistant, snapper, snap-pac as default (ideally also bootable snapshots)
• Provide not only printer, but also scanner support
• Enable pstate driver for AMD CPUs by default
• 1-click solution to enable recommended tweaks for gaming / interactive use
• On KDE desktop:
  • Add dbus service to start Kwallet
  • Configure Kwallet to require no password, but confirmation for access
  • Ship with Discover

Arch install script could be better. The dedicated /home partition is a pain if you don't know what you're doing (I don't know what I'm doing). The encryption thing also breaks a lot of things.

LinuxMint

• Stop crashing when I log in after standby
• Weird graphical glitches
• The WiFi manager. Trying to connect to work WiFi but I then have to fill in info on certificates, protocols and what not. Stuff I don't understand, don't experience on Mac/windows and don't want to know about.
• At least try to make an interesting package manager/store. How about some screenshots and icons?

I wish Debian had a version with more recent software that is suitable for regular use. I know many people use Testing and Sid, but Testing often has delayed security updates and it’s not unusual for Sid to break. And both get weird around the freeze for the next release. It would be great if there was a version like Tumbleweed that was constantly rolling and received automated testing to prevent many of the problems Unstable experiences.

I currently use Tumbleweed on my computers and Debian on my servers, but I would love to use Debian on everything.

Kubuntu

Remove snap < caused loads of shit back in the day, now it's an extremely slow installation system that wants to force me to use it. Fuck you.

Remove systemd < promised to be a super fast init system, took over loads of shit it has nothing to do with and ended up being nothing faster at all. Now my logs are sometimes in actual log files, you know, easy text, sometimes they're in the headache callled journalctl. I always change my SSH server port (Ubuntu server) that was a quick config file change and restart ssh, now it's making systemd files, and 10 minutes to do. Its a constant headache and I fucking hate everything about it

PopOs

Not have 10s of GBs of updates every week. I mean seriously wtf.

For Fedora, replace the current installer (Anaconda) with the openSUSE Tumbleweed installer.

One of the aspects I love about the openSUSE TW installer is the ability to remove groups of packages for the initial install. This is particularly useful if you never use certain programs or intend to replace them with the Flatpak version.

Fedora's bootloader sucks, I want to use SDBoot but it's set up so weirdly that installing it would break the install.

Debian needs a better installer. It'd be awesome if it had something more akin to Fedora/RHEL's Anaconda, or even just made Calamares the default (so long as it didn't install every single locale available like their live inages currently do).

Stop using stupid adjective/animal for release names. When editing an apt list I don't want to have to lookup "which release was 'xenial'?" Just use the yy.mm format.

Arch: Move more of the things shipped by the distro to /usr/, too many things are still in /etc/, /var/ and /srv/. Generally this isn't a problem, but when you want to make an A/B updated image where only /usr/ is shipped it is a bit annoying. Also, bash has no way to have a "distro" version of /etc/profile.

Another benefit is: no .pacnew files in /etc/ (or anywhere else) since those would all be managed by the system maintainer and aren't touched by the package manager

I would want a FreeBSD type of packaging system where system libraries and apps are different. Their binary packages are separated into quarterly and latest so you get a very stable OS but either Debian or arch style package updates.

I wish Ubuntu was just xUbuntu by default and that xfce didn’t have like 4 different settings menus for no reason. I’d also like it if there was a minimalist icon theme by default, and a dock like old school vanilla Ubuntu.

Oh and better multi monitor support

Bring back Linux Mint KDE

Nothing. Artix gives me all the freedoms.

pacman would allow me to install weak dependencies with a simple command-line option rather than black magic wizardry that rivals ffmpeg filtergraphs.

I wish arch had proper printing support, I've never ever been able to get it to work no matter how much I RTFM. I think it should be something you choose at install or that you could set up in an automated fashion.

The distro itself? Idk I usually just write an ansible playbook to get everything to my liking. Run it once on a new install and everything is good.

I would like Debian and the fsf to come to some kind of agreement so Debian can ship the emacs documentation.

more packages; open suse tumbleweed

I’d like it if Arch had a “ready to go” iso I could download that would get me a working desktop with sane defaults and BTRFS or ZFS auto snapshots installed and enabled. Configuring it was fun the first few times. Now it’s a chore

Manjaro: someone diarize the fucking SSL renewal date, please.

Debian, include /sbin and /usr/sbin in PATH by default.

For Alpine Linux:

• support a different process supervisor
  • dinit, or
  • s6 with some high level sugar
• add something like the AUR

Alpine linux but with layers just like Fedora Silverblue

I wish for a default freeworld fedora.

id have nobara go back to Firefox as default browser, or at least a chromium that's a little more palletable like Vivaldi or something. heck even a checkbox at installation asking which browser to install would be fine, anything but stock Google chrome

edit: just double checked and it looks like nobara uses chromium not chrome, my bad

For me Fedora only needs to speed up the dnf and update the installer.

I'd like Gentoo ebuilds to run in a fully isolated namespace/container with only the dependencies explicitly enabled by portage configuration. Something like a mix of nix but with the ebuild syntax.

Fedora user here. A great improvement would simply be shipping unmodified (non "freeworld") versions of mesa packages in the official repositories, so you don't have to install them from rpmfusion, as they are often a few days behind with their mesa package upgrades, which leads to conflicts/issues in the dnf update process.

Every distro with gnome.

Make RDP work as well as it does on Windows.

I'm talking about remoting into the Linux system.

Everytime the system is restarted you have to physically login to the system to unlock the keyring so that your RDP password is accessible or you won't be able to get in. Or you have to remove your keyring password all together. Why is this different than the regular user password?

Also it's weird that it works like VNC where you are controlling the system remotely but anyone local can see what you are doing on the screen. It is also cool to have that option but it shouldn't be the default.

I wish Debian had better support for software that wants to do its own package management.

They do it a little bit with python, but for most things it's either "stay within the wonderful Debian package management but then find out that the node thing you want to do is functionally impossible" or "abandon apt for a mismashed patchwork of randomly-placed and haphazardly-secured independently downloaded little mini-repos for Node, python, maybe some Docker containers, Composer, snap, some stuff that wants you to just wget a shell script and pipe it to sudo sh, and God help you, Nvidia drivers. At least libc6 is secure though."

I wish that there was a big multiarch-style push to acknowledge that lots of things want to do their own little package management now, and that's okay, and somehow bring it into the fold (again their pyenv handling seems like a pretty good example of how it can be done in a mutually-working way) so it's harmonious with the packaging system instead of existing as something of an opponent to it. Maybe this already exists and I'm not aware of it but if it exists I'm not aware of it.

artix: adding arch repos to artix results in bunch of package issues, after using it for a while it gets to a point where you have to specify 50+ --assume-installed flags just to Syyu

i switched to arch just because of this

Fedora Silverblue.

I want to be able to play YouTube videos in Firefox. And video files on desktop. Layering on rpmfusion didn't help. And why will videos play in Gnome Web but not Firefox ugh.

My favorite distro doesn't have the ressources, so i would have the big distros create an alternative to elogind, maybe help on turnstile for this.

Can we get a free software only version of every distro? That's what I want.

A robust way to make an install script on arch Linux.

Release Cosmic DE Alpha…can’t wait!

NixOS

I love NixOS, but the documentation is terrible. Better documentation would go a long way to making it a more user-friendly platform.

Bring back the old xpenguins and xsnow packages in Debian.

I really haven't given nix the language the time it deserves, but I really want nixosr configuration bindings in Python. Yes it makes me want to vomit but I do kind of live and breathe Python these days. Maybe a python nix generator would be more appropriate, either way it would totally destroy the benefits of using nix

Devuan - A better installer like Calamares and stop using backports as default on ISO lol it's a pain to use Ceres from there

Siduction - They should use a bit more ISO's giving 2/3 instead of 5 options to make available more ISO's regularly, obsolete ISO that is updated yearly lmao

I would love to see an ostree-based (immutable) Debian for both stable and unstable.

Aside from that, my nitpicks aren't distro-oriented.

NixOS

Mostly perfect in my opinion but it'd be nice if when they renamed options they didn't deprecate the old option names so old configs still worked

I would make Debian and Arch be deterministic like NixOS, but with a different language and less overhead. I really like the principle but the implementation is subpar.

I'd love yearly Debian releases instead of just every 2 years.

I still don't know the technical details between zram and zswap but I feel like fedora should switch to zswap and support hibernation out the box

Garuda. I wish the base install of wine actually worked, and that half the packages in chaotic-aur weren't buggy as fuck or just completely non functional.

I wish Gentoo would make important information like unmasking packages more easily accessible, like directly into the handbook itself so that I don't have to search how to do it every time I need to unmask a package (I always forget how to).

I also wish alpine Linux had an option to use glibc instead of musl

Slackware: nothing, it's perfect just the way it is.

Debian and Arch, for me, tie as my favorite and honestly can't say I would want to change anything as I need to use the technology more before I can critique it like that.

Fedora

• not made in the US so their images can ship nonfree drivers and codecs
• thus they had ARM images for Atomic variants!
• flathub instead of fedora flatpaks
• KDE first instead of GNOME (GNOME is okay and very nice in many parts, but absurdly lacking in others)

I like the rest. It would be cool if they could adopt musl like Alpine, glibc is a mess and you basically need to compile every software against musl manually to use it on Fedora.

Apart from that, best Distro ever.

Nothing. Slackware is perfect and complete.

Arch, literally nothing, everything i didnt like i changed myself. Now i have the perfect user experience

Linux Mint: Add a GUI utility for making Nemo Actions, it's such a useful thing to be able to do. I might just write a little applet myself in Python.

Also, get rid of as much Gnome UX as possible. Get your empty sandwich menus, buttons crammed into the top bar and lack of functionality the fuck out of my computer and put it in the septic tank with the rest of the putrid assgarbage.