I think the problem here is the motivation. The techies are scratching their itches because they can, making more tiling wms and such, but few are motivated to work on things they aren’t personally interested in, such as user-friendliness etc. So it’s either up to us techies to work on systems we don’t use ourselves, or it won’t happen.

Ok, let’s hereby declare that Debian + Gnome is the official Linux. Everyone who wants Linux to have more users must run Debian and Gnome. First, how do we convince everyone to not use their favorite distros?

In addition to this, it’s also a good idea to backup important data first.

Indeed. I believe most users will just switch to flathub. Sort of how most users will install some codecs, but it can’t legally be included in the base install.

It’s about making sure you know what is inside the flatpaks. If you make your own set of flatpaks, you can distribute them with the OS. It’s not that fedora flatpaks aren’t distro-agnostic, you can use them on any distro. They just want a set where they can verify the build process and trust.

Same. I have installed so many systems that I just want the defaults to be what I’m used to. The OS itself is just a tool to let me work on the things I actually find interesting.

I’ve read the arguments and trust the people who know far more than I do about this, but… I just find it difficult to think of “unlocks automatically” as more safe than “is locked until I enter my password”. I’m open for it, but it just feels strange to me.

The urge to distrohop can be a distraction, but an itch that needs to be scratched now and then. I tend to always end up where I started, but when I do I feel better about it.

Do you know which packages and what defaults? I’ve tried to find the differences but I can’t really find what is different, except for wallpaper etc.

What is in LMDE that isn’t in plain Debian out of the box beyond branding?

I’ve had this idea a few times over the years, but I always get stuck at figuring out: what is it actually I want to happen? If I remove a local file, should it be removed from the backup too? If I edit a file, should the newer version replace the old in the backup, or be saved separately, or just the delta between the files? I could never decide what I wanted.

Is it known which distro they are using?

Sometimes I think “if debian had a flashy website and a few tweaks for user friendliness, then it would be just as attractive as linux mint or ubuntu for new users”, and other times I think “isn’t this exactly what most debian based distros are already?” Would there be a benefit if those projects worked under the debian name, something like debian workstation pure blend, or debian corporate pure blend? I don’t know.

Expanding on this, we could make it so that root must use ed(1) to edit files?

For JavaFX I ended up putting both JDK and JavaFX in my home dir and pointed vscodium to the right paths, I could get programs to compile but for some reason it would not let me open windows from inside, complaining that DISPLAY was not set or available iirc, even though I did set the env variable inside. Either way, I’m not ready for this container work-flow. Though I suspect that I could get used to better practices. Do you install git and your editor of choice separately in all dev containers? Like, how much of the tooling should be inside or on host?

About a year ago I started experimenting with the whole container-based workflow thing. I don’t know how much time I’ve spent on setting up various programming environments, and there’s always hurdles like getting a flatpak editor have access to java and actually be able to run javafx programs. And with distroboxes, what if my code needs access to a database that is started in a docker container on the host system, do I install docker inside the distrobox? I’ve had so many configuration issues. Every time I try I come back to debian stable and it feels like home.

I like the debian way with a separate repo for the non-free things needed for the hardware to function, so it’s not all or nothing. I want my wifi to work, but beyond things like that I only want free software.

I like it this way. When you say old, I hear “the environment is predictable”. What works today won’t break in a week because an update changed functionality of something. As long as I have hardware support, I don’t need the latest packages for what I do.

Ugh, I’ve been down the same rabbit hole, but gave up and just downloaded the jdk to my home directory and set the java path in vscodium to point to it. Same with maven.

Good points. I’ll have to ponder this for a while.