7 Features and Applications all Linux Distros SHOULD SHIP WITH
2,212I’ve tried a bunch of distributions, and I’ve played a lot with closed source systems, like Windows 10 and Mac OS X, and in dealing with all these systems, I’ve found I always lacked a few things in various Linux distros, so here is a list of various features and apps I’d like most distros to implement out of the box.
Support the channel on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thelinuxexperiment
Follow me on Twitter : http://twitter.com/thelinuxEXP
Gear I use and recommend to make my videos:
https://www.amazon.com/shop/thelinuxexperiment
Gestures for the trackpad
This one is baffling to me. As of today, I’ve yet to test a distro that supports anything else than two finger scrolling. It’s actually pretty easy to add gestures to a Linux distro, with libinput-gestures, and the Gestures GTK app, and i don’t understand why distro builders don’t take advantage of these tools to create a more user friendly experience on laptops. There might be issues with libinput gestures I’m not aware of, or maybe they just don’t use laptops, but when every distro uses virtual workspaces, having the ability to three of 4 finger swipe to switch workspaces seems like a mandatory feature to include.
Kde / GS Connect
Android is the most popular phone OS in the world, and phone - computer integration is awesome. I’d love to see Linux distros shipping with KDE connect, or its GNOME equivalent, GS connect. This tool allows you to use your phone as a remote for your computer, share notifications between the 2 devices, anwser text messages from your computer, and much more. This tool is great, and I think that apart from Zorin OS, which ships a re-branded version of it called Zorin Connect, most other distros ignore this fantastic piece of software.
Fractional scaling, per monitor if possible
I know, Wayland can support it, and a config is available in GNOME, as an experimental option, but it’s almost 2020, and only having 2X scaling as an option is ridiculous. Fractional scaling might make some stuff blurry, and tax the GPU more, but it’s sorely needed on most of today’s laptops, since manufacturers insist on shipping ultra high resolution displays on small form factors. Hi DPI support, and fractional scaling needs to be implemented at some point, and made available by default, for Wayland, and for Xorg, which is still the solution almost 100% of distros ship with.
Complete App Store experience
No distro comes close to elementary OS in this regard: it allows people to buy applications, on a pay what you want basis, it integrates links to donations for the developers, and it’s an awesome way to make users take notice of the fact that open source doesn’t mean free. Still, there are pieces missing from that experience, and the big one is restoring purchases. Since you don’t connect to an elementary OS account to buy these apps, there is no way of telling you already bought them. If you reinstall, then the OS behaves as if you’d never bought the applications. Not too bad for now, since you can elect to pay 0 for the app you’ve already bought, but since the OS demands you update each non-bought app manually, it can become annoying. It’s also a block for software that would like to define a fixed price. The App Center, and all other sotfware centers need to adopt a common standard on this, with a unique account, and the abillity to buy, and restore applications.
Integration with major cloud providers
GNOME does it pretty well, with its Online Accounts thing. You can add your google account, and get your Drive files, your email account, calendar, and such. It still needs to be expanded to support other types of accounts: social ones, like Facebook (some people still use it, although I’m not one of them), Twitter, Mastodon, whatever there is out there. Other desktop environments also need to implement this quickly. It just makes life so much easier for users, to just enter the credentials once, and be done with it. More than this, I think integration should also be handled for cloud storage providers: nextcloud accounts, pCloud, Onedrive, Dropbox, and others would really help make everything more integrated. AA solution to sync settings for various apps using one of these providers would also be great.
A backup solution
If syncing is not in the cards, at least ship Deja Dup or something equivalent! These backup solutions are great, automated, can do incremental backups, and they reinforce the idea that you need to backup your data. Some distros already ship with such solutions, like Manjaro, but most mainstream distros don’t.
In the end, all of this can be done by yourself, installing stuff afterwards, it just takes a bit of time, isn’t completely intuitive, and other systems do it pretty well. All these features exist on Windows and mac OS X by default, and are super handy.