Oh yeah! That downgrade option sounds cool. The only time I kinda regretted being on Manjaro. VirtualBox 7 still doesn’t have functional graphics. I tried downgrade, but that didn’t work. Maybe I should have tried deleting the VirtualBox config 🤔
Most distros have a checkbox during the installer that will add non-free components. It’s a separate EULA you need to agree to so they can’t do it for you.
You may not care, but the distro provider’s legal team absolutely cares about not getting sued for automatically bundling components with an incompatible license agreement
The non-free components I’ve seen on installers are usually for Nvidia’s proprietary drivers. Not codecs.
Sounds like legal panic if you ask me. There’s been no precedent for litigation on use of licensed codecs which most have been using either way prior in their builds and packages.
MPEG LA is (now Via Licensing Alliance) has been active in collecting fees and defending patents. There is no reason to assume they won’t go after distros, particularly those who can pay given that they are willing to take on anyone else. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG_LA
Because those distros have (as we are talking about) distanced themselves from the patent encumbered codecs? When Google tried to get behind VP8, MPEG LA was right there to try and stop them by trying to get them into the pool. You would think google could have stood up to that…
I read that apparently if you don’t input a password for root that it apparently installs sudo. I might be wrong about this but could be worth a Google
It’s just a general system setup and config tool. I’m assuming that, like me, you already know how to do all that stuff without yast but it’s good for newbies and people that aren’t super nerds. With all of the anti terminal stuff I always read about on the internet you’d think at least ubuntu would have their own version of it or something similar.
“YaST is a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server tool that provides a graphical interface for all essential installation and system configuration tasks. Whether you need to update packages, configure a printer, modify firewall settings, set up an FTP server, or partition a hard disk—you can do it using YaST.”
When I need an office suite, Libreoffice is the one I use, but it’s so infrequent that I reinstall writer or whatever part I need at the time and then uninstall again.
The main reason it bothers me is I will see it being updated frequently (and they’re not small updates) - and I’ve probably never ran the thing since the last OS install most of the time.
Let’s try the other way around: what default apps are pre installed that really don’t need or should not be?
I get that most distros try to give a good out of the box desktop for the average user, while also saving time for who is (trying to) providing services or building machines to sell but it can get annoying booting into a fresh install, take a look at the defaults and go “nah, that’s going away, and that, that and the other”.
I’m not advocating for LFS but sometimes I wish we could get an option to install just what is necessary to make the hardware run and a chosen desktop or window manager and from there install whatever we may need.
Not a specific distro per se but I’m shocked by how many minified docker images do not include which I’ve wasted so much time trying to figure out why a build failed with some tool missing after I explicitly installed that tool only to find deep down in a script somewhere a tool=$(which tool) >/dev/null in there failing and eating the error message! Remember folks always which which first to avoid such issues ;)
Biggest surprise here is that browsers still have no EPUB support build in. It’s such a mind boggling oversight. They even got PDF support, but long form xHTML content is somehow still a big no.
Only Edge had EPUB for a little while, but even that got lost when they switched to Chromium.
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