Linux @lemmy.ml

1y ago

What feature/utility/app are you surprised is not installed by default in Linux distributions?

201 comments

I think most people (including myself) prefer a minimal desktop by default, and then proceed to install only the software they need. Nevertheless, it always surprises me when I log in to a system that doesn't have vim.
- For almost all users, especially beginners, nano is just simpler faster and better. A lot of distributions are bundling it, and I am finding indeed systems without vim at all.
  
  Although most of the times while vim is not installed vi is. Even often together with nano.
  
  Especially for beginners, micro would be even better.
- I disagree. Don't get me wrong, vim is amazing and all that, but I think nano is easier for new users to grok out of the box, making it a better choice most of the time. What it lacks in features it makes up for in transparency.
  100% agree about the minimal set of desktop apps, though. That drives me crazy.
  Just my 0.02$.
  Edit: silly mistakes and clarification
- In all distro I tried, I always found Vi.
  
  Vi is standardized in both POSIX and Single Unix Specification.
  
  You've never used a minimal Linux distro for cloud servers then. Some don't ship any text editors. Others ship only nano. Part of the reason why I think learn vim because vi(m) is everywhere argument is removed. It's factually incorrect.
- but they do contains vi

less, I don't remember what distro it was, but there wasn't less. There was more though.
- Sometimes, more is less.
  
  There's a LESS_IS_MORE env var for less which makes it behave like more. Or something like that. Check the manpage
  
  But when will "then" be "now"?
- Also, sometimes they have an old version of less. There was a change in the past, I don't know, five or so years that made the "exit if less than one page" flag behave better. I don't remember the specifics but it made using it as a fit pager way better. It used to be that it was difficult to have it act like cat when the output was less than a page. But newer versions support it.
- What distro was this?

git not installed in ubuntu based distro was the shock for me.
- I believe ubuntu doesn't have it installed by default.
  
  Ubuntu wants you to use snap for all your app needs. I think their plan is to make repos only for os maintenance and installation and nothing else.

Git. I feel like that is a pretty important part of any linux os nowadays

htop
- What's the point to install htop when top is being preinstalled like 99% of time?
  
  Much easier and faster to get useful information out of htop.

KDE Connect on KDE distros, just feels part of the KDE experience

git really should be installed by default these days

A Doom-clone. I mean, come on.
Seriously tho, Gparted for how useful it is.

git isn't in Arch's base-devel
- Damn, I am quite sure it's in Debians build-essentials!

Nano (or pico). I had to use vi one time 😭
- Which distro doesn't ship nano? I've only ever seen this in embedded or docker contexts.
  Condolences for your vile experiences, though.
  
  I think Debian doesn't cause I used it in some containers
  
  I think it was OpenWRT
  
  Yeah I find that nano is on basically everything but alpine or other minimalist distros for containers. As long as I have access to it on the host I'm doing okay.
- 🤕 <-- he was forced to use vi
- How did you get out of it?
  
  By becoming a CTO and having an early retirement. Or not at all.
- I remember using nano in college when I was a baby dev. I would write everything locally then paste into nano. I don't remember if the professor gave us an FTP link or if I was just trying around but I pasted the server address into the file explorer (I think nautilus, I don't remember) and it managed to connect. It made it all so easy.
  Good times, writing assembly in nano lmao!

tmux, htop, vim
- What distros don't include tmux and vim? Ubuntu has had them for at least a decade.
  
  by default?
  My work laptop came with Ubuntu preinstaled and didn't have tmux nor htop.
  Vim is not present by default in at least debian and arch. Although vi is present in every distribution I believe.
- I was surprised that gnome ships with comes with it in default.

Traceroute.
- Tracer T
- Does anyone know why this isn't included?
  It's always so useful for network stuff.

I am surprised that vi is often available, but not vim. It's really annoying on many RHEL based distros, because I am so used to typing vim. Otherwise there is just git I deem essential.
- Definitely not limited to RHEL!
- Nowadays vi is just a symlink to vim.tiny, so you're actually running vim (in vi mode).
  
  No. If you have vim installed that's true on many (some?) systems. As I said some distros have vi available, but not vim which is the annoying part.
- Yeah, at least some distros have VIM tiny or whatever it's called so my muscle memory benefits me.
  
  Most distros I mess with have busybox installed, which as vi in it, but yeah sudo apt install vim is one of the first commands I run.
- Solution - learn using vi. You already did most of the work by learmjng vim.
  
  There is not really anything to learn. It is just lacking some useful features and shortcuts which make it slower to use. It's still much better than nothing.
  Usually my biggest issue is that I am so used to write vim over vi. At least for small edits.

netstat curl and git
- netstat is mostly deprecated and superseded by the ss command.
  
  I had an error with Xampp starting the Apache server by not having netstat installed
  
  Wait? ss? why haven't I heard of this?

git rsync htop `
- Add tmux and you've got almost everything I install on a fresh install of any distro.
  Almost everything. The last thing is vim.

IMO nothing. As long as it can detect network I can install whatever tools I need.
- Agreed. The alternative is bloating the system with tools the user may not need. I'd rather just have to install a bunch of stuff on first use.
- wifi drivers then?
- I couldn't install some Python socks package because I need a proxy to access the Internet, but I needed the package to install any updates through socks, so I couldn't install the package because I didn't have it

Definitely git
- Which one doesn't have it?
  
  Debian doesn't have it installed by default. Can confirm, I'd love to have git so I can pull down my scripts and go back to sleep with every new machine.
  
  at least Arch (and derivatives) and Guix. probably a lot more of them

useradd - I just wanted to give a friend my notebook for a python lecture and thought I could just add him as a new user. Apparently not by default.
- Ran into this some time ago and learned that there is a more rudimentary command adduser instead but it does not do things like home folder creation
  
  Yeah, useradd should be the default over adduser
- Seems like it would have to exist to create your initial login, unless you only had a root user
  
  You can just manually edit /etc/passwd

openssh-server, how can you connect to your PC from elsewhere without sshd ?!?

Multimedia/ h264 codecs ??
KDE/GSconnect
Something like Arch's downgrade package + an archive of package versions
Hardware video acceleration support is sorely lacking
Picture-in-picture in Gnome's Wayland (bug that a gnome-shell extension fixes!)
- Multimedia codecs have a different license agreement than the OS so they aren't bundled by default for a reason
  
  I don't care about the licenses. If I click on my media and it refuses to play because some codec is omitted by default, am annoyed nonetheless.
- Not sure why KDE/GSconnect would need to be preinstalled tbh. But I agree with the others
  
  because kde connect is so well made and everyone with a smartphone should use it
  
  Quality of life improvement. Plus it's normal for operating systems to have some kind of smartphone/smart device integration now.
- 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 🤔

First installs for me are always vim and tmux.

ncdu for analyzing disk space usage in TUI.

I'm always shocked that other distros haven't made their own version of Yast from opensuse
- I've tried yast and I'm still unsure what it was supposed to do. I just poked around, asked me if I know than I'm doing and then just left
  
  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."
  But yeah, I actually hardly ever use it myself.
- I think MX Linux has something similar

htop, distrobox and in some cases Flatpak!
Edit: after reading the comments I want to add curl and git, seriously, why aren't those a default?!

Debian, sudo, at least when ever I install it without a desktop.
edit: I'm dumb af, it tells you right in the installer, I just never read it
- 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
  
  The installer says this when it asks you to type a root password. I don't know why, but for some reason the information is both right there and easy to miss.
  
  That kinda makes sense but I never would have found it on my own.
- Classic mistake :)

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.
- Sounds like Arch.
  
  Not a chance. Me and Arch don't mix. I'm a Debianite.
  
  seconded. That is exactly how I built my system, starting from a minimal install
  
  KDE shipped with so much useless stuff.
- coreutils.

nslookup quite a few times I'd try and resolve a domain name only to find out the command isn't available and I'd need to google what package adds it.
- I thought it was deprecated in favor of the host and dig commands.
- no nslookup, go with dig

The first couple commands I run after install:
undefined

$ sudo apt install vim $ sudo apt autopurge libreoffice*
- I actually like Libre office very much, since it's a good open source office software.
  
  I'm not suggesting it's bad, I just don't use it much and it's always preinstalled.
- Which office suite do you use?
  
  Some people don't need an office suite at all.
  
  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.

I always use:
tealdeer (tldr implementation that's not slow as molasses)
ripgrep
- Thank you so much for listing tealdeer. It's way faster than tldr.
  
  You're welcome! If you're a different spez. If you are the Reddit spez, you are not welcome.

dhcpcd (Arch)
- Well really
  anything (Arch)

Mission Center, it finally brings a task manager like UI on Linux. Alternative for people not wanting to use a TUI like htop.

No time shift or equivalent in neon.

EPUB reader
- 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.
  
  Ya, epub is just html + zip

bash-completion
- This and command-not-found

Lately, jq
- awk for the modern age

htop. I get that top is ancient and just about part of the definition of a standard Linux system, but damn is it unfriendly

C compiler
- Which one?
  
  Keil, of course.

mosh, tmux, htop, vim

bash and zsh shell history suggest box aka hstr. A bash history which is sorted by the times you use a command and not in a chronological order. Sooooooo good 😉

udisks2.

Stacer

Telnet client
- The 90s called...

neofetch
- One of my two only used commands. The other being yay.
  
  Dude that is risky as hell, you use yay to install all of your things? With yay they have full permissions on your machine. Use pacman instead

File manager necessary actions and plugins

I have a lot of SBCs, and have various ansible scripts that install stuff in "levels" depending on what I need.
Basic level is the "must-haves."
python 3-minimal, chrony, openssh-server, python 3-apt, aptitude, unattended-upgrades, boxes, figlet, dialog, apt-utils, git, htop, multitail, ncdu, sysstat, vim, tree, util-linux
There's, also "server level," "desktop level," and "demo level," for when I do training.
- recently, I use btop in replacement of htop, really easy to use and pretty to look at.

abcde.sh
- The CD ripper, yeah? Agreed, great tool.

emacs
I realize half of you people never touch it, but come on. It's not that large a package these days.
- What that reasoning we should install sauerbraten because most people have plenty of hdd space and broadband internet. Better yet, just install all the games so we can relax every now and then between the hard work.
  
  Broadband internet?
- It pull 400MB of packages + deps on my machine
  
  You probably installed the graphical one. emacs-nox is command-line only and significantly smaller.

201 comments