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.

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

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

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 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.

Every distro.

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

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?

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.

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!)