Linux

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

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.

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

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

The documentation. It needs more of it.

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.

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

No snaps or flatpak by default.

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.

I would get rid of snaps.

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?

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.

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.

(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”.

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.

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?

bootloaders should always be packaged with a pacman hook

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.

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

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

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).

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.

Bring back Linux Mint KDE

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.

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.

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.

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

I wish for a default freeworld fedora.

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!)

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