Every distro could learn from Arch Wiki
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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Even Arch Linux could learn from the Arch Wiki.
The Debian Wiki would actually like a word.
There is stuff in there that's not found anywhere else. For example while researching driverless printing recently I found a huge page on the Debian Wiki but the Arch wiki only has a paragraph saying supporting printers should be detected automatically.
The Debian wiki is awsome. But it's less noob friendly than Arch wiki.
The web UI looks like an old forum from 2000. Don't get me wrong, a well written manpage style webpage is way better than an eye candy bloated scripted webpage (IMO) and I really like how detailed the Debian wiki is. But in today's "mental standards", the Debian wiki is not attractive enough for most new comer.
Also, It seems the Debian wiki is not as indexed as Arch wiki on the web.
Finally... I can't access their wiki with my VPN ! :/.
But I do agree, The Debian wiki is a gold mine !!!
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All distros, or none: flatpak has to improve in regards to launching an app from terminal. Following is a joke:
flatpak run com.github.iwalton3.jellyfin-media-player
Why can’t the installation create aliases like
flatpak run jellyfin-media-player ? And then highlight conflicts during?
It would also be nice if it could alias to the normal command, for example, LibreOffice with CLI commands like lowriter or localc.
Did you know you can evoke LibreOffice from the terminal to convert one file format to another? It can do what Pandoc does, but also works on old .doc files. Flatpak's weird CLI behavior makes it difficult to use though.
Ask the devs. I haven't bothered asking so far. There's fp https://github.com/DLopezJr/fp but I don't like workaround if it's easily fixed upstream and it's not like they wouldn't know that it's bullshit. Maybe they can't decide upon a solution. Or are waiting for another important and relevant update.
This is extremely simple to fix with scripts that can be automatically created on install time. Here is a quick script I just wrote. It will search for first matching app and run it. Just save the script as flatrun, give it executable bit and put it into $PATH. Run it as like this: flatrun freetube
#!/usr/bin/env bash
# flatrun e
# flatrun freetube
if [ "${#}" -eq 0 ]; then
flatpak list --app --columns=name,application
else
app="$(
flatpak list --app --columns=name,application |
grep -i -F "${@}" |
awk -F'\t' '{print $2}'
)"
if [ -z "${app}" ]; then
flatpak list --app --columns=name,application
elif [[ "$(echo "${app}" | wc -l)" -gt 1 ]]; then
echo "${app}"
else
flatpak run "${app}"
fi
fi
Edit: Just updated the script to output the list of matching apps, if it matches more than one.
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It’d be dangerous if an installed app claimed to be something like sudo or bash. Even if a mechanism was created for flatpak apps to claim a single shell command, there is no centralized authority on all flatpak apps to vet them. If there was for flathub, and each uploaded package was checked, that still leaves every other non-flathub flatpak repo which must implement the same vetting. Because there’s no way to guarantee to do it safely, and because flatpak devs are unwilling to compromise, this is just what we get.
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flatpak run com.github.iwalton3.jellyfin-media-player
You can use /var/lib/flatpak/exports/bin/com.github.iwalton3.jellyfin-media-player instead.
and then create aliases or symlinks (for example in ~/bin/) for that.
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The one thing I wish every distro would incorporate is the way Gentoo handles config file updates. If there are any changes you get the option of using a very simple side by side merge where you go through all the differences of the old and new configuration where you can decide which one to use going forward.
While you will get somewhat the same from apt, I like the Debian way of providing base config support in packages and have local config loaded by include statements.
As you don’t edit the default config and automatic updates can happen w/o user input and your config will stay safe
That's the way it should be. But it depends on the software.
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Pacman just dumps you a .pacnew, leaving the comparison to you (y'know, KISS). Your change isn't touched, unless it's .pacsave.
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Fedora, NixOS and Void need a proper wiki like Arch
Most distros could also learn from Arch and create something similar to the AUR. Nix is going in the right direction.
And I guess almost all distros could learn from Artix and Devuan and reconsider if systemd is the right choice.
honestly I wished the arch wiki turned into a distro agnostic wiki. i have been using debian for decades and use arch wiki all the time but it would be nice to have a one stop shop for linux documentation. the Wikipedia of Linux run as a coalition.
NixOS is at least starting to work on a new wiki. The old one is gone and is only accessible from archive.org.
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I think more distros should have an easy way to set up disk level encryption in the installation
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".
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I usually use Fedora these days and I have few complaints but I sometimes miss the ArchWiki. Not that Federa isn’t well-documented — it obviously is well documented by nature of being a RedHat product — but people in the Arch community will sometimes make a whole page to document how they fixed a specific laptop model’s relatively unimportant hardware compatibility issue.
I'm on Fedora too and quite often end up on the Arch wiki. A lot of the stuff there applies on other distros too.
Gentoo - patience.
But seriously. With the USE flags, compiler options, you can understand software more from a developer's point of view.
You can try to optimize software for your hardware.
Fully explore the configure options. With a binary package you have no control.
Linux Mint could learn from Arch and document...anything. 3/5 of the Mint manual is bitching about Ubuntu and the other 2/5 are about printers.
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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.
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.
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I think with Linux Mint the main User Friendly thing is its DE. But with Debian you can install Cinnamon DE as well. https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=cinnamon
btw, I quite like the Debian website, colors and design.
I am sure you are aware of this: https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
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Slackware - if it ain't broken don't fix it. Gentoo - USE flags. Mint - user-friendly.
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OpenSuSe - snapper for taking btrfs snapshots and rolling back. It’s basically a bulletproof way to do updates and recovery. Get a bad update or change a config in correctly you can roll back. Updates it automagically does this for you
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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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I do not recall other distros failing to update due to GPG key issues but it has happened to me on Arch distros many times. It is the biggest pain when converting from something like Manjaro to something like EndeavourOS as well.
I really do not understand why this cannot be fixed.
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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.
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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.
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Not my current distro but I love ChimeraLinux, they manage to put musl and BSD userland into a working wonderful distro. I wish more distros adopted musl.
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