this post was submitted on 14 May 2023
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What's that one feature you liked so much while distrohopping that you want it by default in all distros? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by Owell1984@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
37 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I have always been discovering new things about Linux distros while distro hopping. And when I get something I really like, I just copy the package name and make sure I install it in every distro I use in the future.

Let me start:

  1. Clipboard manager (Gpaste)
  2. KDE connect
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[–] lhotze@lemmy.ml 19 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Everything NixOS (https://nixos.org) does. I am 99% sure that if anyone tries it out and gets comfortable with it they will never change again.

  • Your configuration is written in code, it is therefore persistent. Do you know that annoying feeling of "oh shit, how did I configure x program that I want to install on this other machine"? Never again.
  • You can wipe your machine and recover your config in no time. I have 3 machines working with the same config except for small variations. If I change the command to take a screenshot it changes in all of them. If I change my firefox bookmarks it is persisted accross them too. Its awesome.
  • NixOS generates revisions of your config automatically. Ifyou change something and it breaks you can always use a previous version of your system that you know works to fix it.
  • The Nix package repository is the largest (by far) in all the linux ecosystem. And, even if a package you want is missing, adding it yourself is not that hard.

I am probably missing other nice things, but those are awesome already. It's true that the learning curve it a bit steeper than usual, but there is no distro quite like it and even for non coders you can get a lot out of it.

[–] yaru 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nix has been on my mind for a while, but I've been hesitant to go all in. Unfortunately, messing around a bit with VMs I still don't feel like I have a good handle on how it all works.

One question I'd ask you is how much upfront work it is to get, say, a stable setup for a laptop where all of the little things are working (opening/closing the lid, connecting to external screen, switching audio outputs, media keys. Laptop stuff!)

As context, a long time ago I ran Gentoo and later Arch, so I'm not technically clueless, but eventually decided to switch to easier distros that came with a reasonable system defaults that works out of the box. I'm super interested in NixOS for all the reasons you mentioned, but worried about how time I'll end up spending just getting that config file to where I want it!

[–] lhotze@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The stable setup on the laptop you can get by using a DE like Gnome that comes with batteries included. If you go for more minimal setups like a window manager it will take quite a bit longer. NixOS as a distribution is pretty easy to get running, if you are familiar with the desktop environment that you install in your system getting it setup is much much simpler than doing so in other distros like Arch, since it usually consists of adding a line like desktopEnvironment.gnome.enable = true to your config and the system takes care of almost everything. I even think that gnome gets installed by default on the first run.

[–] yaru 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks! I ended up messing with Nixos a bunch in the past few weeks. My impression is generally positive, though while many of the things it does are very elegant (like the gnome example you mentioned), a lot of it also seems a bit hacky. Ultimately, figuring out how to declaratively configure specific things seems to take so much more time than my current approach of a written document detailing the steps of setting up my system.

I'm going to keep tinkering in a VM though, and maybe I'll have a breakthrough. Keeping configs working across two computers especially is tempting (read: an excuse to get a second computer).

One last question - one of the things I worked on was Firefox with home manager. How did you get it set up so bookmarks were included in the config?

[–] lhotze@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

When you set a FF profile there is a key called bookmarks. You can set them there:

programs.firefox = {
  enable = true;
  extensions = [
    pkgs.nur.repos.rycee.firefox-addons.vimium
    ...
  ];
  profiles = {
    my-profile = {
      name = "yourname";
      settings = {};
      bookmarks = [
         {
           name = "This is a folder";
           toolbar = true;
           bookmarks = [
             {
               name = "You can nest folders";
               bookmarks = [
                 {
                   name = "This is a lemmy bookmark";
                   keyword = "lemmy";
                   url = "https://lemmy.ml/";
                 }
            ...
        ];
      ];
    };
  };
};

You can always look at the home manager reference, I usually look here.

[–] Owell1984@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

undefined> Your configuration is written in code, it is therefore persistent. Do you know that annoying feeling of “oh shit, how did I configure x program that I want to install on this other machine”? Never again.

This is sick! thank you!

[–] Zach777@fosstodon.org 1 points 1 year ago

@lhotze @Owell1984 This singlehandedly makes me want to switch off Ubuntu.

[–] Tiuku@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's quite reasonable to switch to Guix, as it too is "a functional distro".

[–] Laser@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

I recently tried NixOS and was considering Guix as well, however what made me decide on NixOS was the fact that it doesn't restrict you to free packages by the distro default choice.

Does Guix have an equivalent to flakes or does it even need one? I never looked closer into the design.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

BTRFS snapshots like openSUSE and now also Fedora has it. I don't want to use a distro without them anymore. Unfortunately, configuring them yourself is a bit more involved than just installing a package...

[–] Secunergy@social.tchncs.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Ephera @Owell1984 Do you a good source for a tutorial how to configure snapshots? (on OpenSUSE)

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh, on openSUSE, you don't need to configure anything. Just install with the default partition setup and it will automatically take snapshots of your operating system (/home/ is excluded) whenever there are changes.

It uses incremental snapshots, so they won't take up infinite space...

[–] Secunergy@social.tchncs.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Ephera Thanks, I noticed that my system does take snapshots automatically (I am new to openSUSE) but thought maybe there is still something to optimize 👍🏼

[–] jumanjimanju@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Look on the the arch wiki, you can tweak snapshot/cleanup frequencies, which is nice

[–] sxan@midwest.social 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

For KDE Connect, there's a headless program called mconnect with no Qt (or KDE) dependencies. I use it with the KDE Connect Android app, and it works well. All of the commands on the Linux end are CLI, and many of the functions are supported.

Supported functions

Edit: link to source

[–] Owell1984@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

really sorry, I don't understand the point of this app. I mean, KDE connect works well, so why change?

Are you talking about a situation where it's not possible to install those Qt or KDE dependencies (then it might be useful to me)

Thank you for your output either way!

[–] finickydesert@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Not everyone likes KDE

[–] Ascend@social.vivaldi.net 3 points 1 year ago

@finickydesert
It is okay, just you what you like :)

[–] russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'd probably say the vast amount of packages that can be installed via the AUR, but since the rising popularity of Flatpak, we're getting incredibly close to this.

My next want would be having the ability to make your system declarative (at least, the initial config) in a fashion that NixOS and Guix do.

[–] eshep@social.trom.tf 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Owell1984 @russjr08 Things usually have a .deb or .rpm available which almost always unpack and run with no issue regardless of distro.

[–] russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.net 3 points 1 year ago

Oh for sure (and a lot of AUR packages are exactly just that), but nothing beats the simplicity and speed of running a quick sudo pacman -S package_name and then being up and running :)

[–] sxan@midwest.social 2 points 1 year ago

I have really come to depend on rolling-release systems. I have a few alliances that run Ubuntu, because of a dependency on vendor packages and insufficient interest in fighting with software+hardware issues, and I hate when I have to deal with them. The paupacy of software, the frequent breakage on release upgrades; I don't know how people who prefer these systems justify how bad they are in comparison to Arch (or Nix, or any other rolling release-based distro).

I haven't yet done it, but Arch is so reliable I'm tempted to create a daily -Syu cron job (or, more precisely, a systemd timer job, because I'm only yet running Artix on a couple of systems). The only thing that gives me pause are the kernel updates, which are frequency and necessitate system reboots.

Those kernel updates really make me wish Linus had focused on a microkernel architecture.

[–] eshep@social.trom.tf 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Owell1984 Having #vim and #tmux in liveOS should be standard practice.

[–] Owell1984@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I didn't know about tmux. I haven't heard much about it. What's it's purpose and what use would it have for a general user?

[–] normalmode@mastodon.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Owell1984 @eshep It has 2 basic functions:

  1. It allows you to add (effectively) tab pages to your shell, and split each page into multiple windows. Yes your terminal can likely do this, but this is running inside your shell, so it works the same way if you’re logged in locally or running over SSH.

1/2

[–] normalmode@mastodon.social 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

@Owell1984 @eshep 2. Your tmux session runs in a server process, so if you close the enclosing terminal or disconnect from your SSH session, everything in your tmux session keeps running and you can reconnect to it later on.

You can also have a bunch of tmux sessions running in a single tmux server, and switch between them with a couple of keystrokes.

Once you start using tmux (or screen) it’s very hard to imagine going back to life without it!

2/2

[–] eshep@social.trom.tf 3 points 1 year ago

@Owell1984 @normalmode I'm perty sure I'd go mad if I had no way of installin one of em. 😅

[–] eshep@social.trom.tf 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@Owell1984 It's a terminal multiplexer. If you've heard of screen, it's very similar. Maybe not so useful for a "general user", but I find it indispensably useful on those occasions where I need a live disc.

[–] Owell1984@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

@eshep@social.trom.tf @normalmode@mastodon.social Thanks guys, I will be trying to learn Bash soon, I am gonna install tmux. As for vim, obv, I have it installed :')

[–] 4pK2@aus.social 2 points 1 year ago

@Owell1984 @eshep tmux and Vim are the 2 things I return to every couple of years. I commit to using them everywhere so everything gets stuck in muscle memory and it all becomes second nature. And then I get sick of it and say screw that (for a year or two).

[–] Vorthas@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

I would say AUR access with either Xfce or MATE as a default and first-class option for DEs. It's hard to go to a distro without AUR access for a lot of what I use, doable, but hard.

[–] finickydesert@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  • Flatpak
  • podman
  • ansible
[–] Pantherina@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

Kde has Klipper and everything else? Maybe I miss stability, because currently its a buggy mess sometimes.

MXLinux's Conky manager... havent got it to run normally again.

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