5 Years of Pop _OS(blog.system76.com) |
5 Years of Pop _OS(blog.system76.com) |
Highly recommended if you want a Linux desktop computer.
And it was quite a nice machine, great linux compat, the 4-core i7 in it performed quite well and it let me load it up with RAM. It wasn't too heavy or anything and I liked the display.
But the battery life. Good lord. 45 minutes, 55 if I messed and fussed with power settings and such. Basically gaming-laptop-tier "more like a UPS than a battery" battery performance.
My next laptop was a thinkpad T440s and it had similarly good linux compat and it performed much better for battery life - I got an i5 in that one and saw 8ish hours of battery life, and it had a hot-swap feature where I could swap in a big-ass battery once I depleted the slim one and get an additional 20(!!) something hours of battery life on a single boot. Great for car trips and heavy all-day use like at conferences.
But then superfish and I swore Lenovo had lost me for-ever.
So my current laptop is an XPS13 and I get 8-10ish hours off one charge with it, and it is super thin and the only Linux issue I've had is needing a very new kernel when I bought it new a year and a half or so ago, new enough that Linux Mint didn't ship it OOTB and the live ISO couldn't get WiFi, so I installed Arch instead, where their latest install image did indeed have a sufficiently new kernel.
So I'm a happy XPS user right now and I've found I like the 13" form factor. Would I be disappointed on battery performance if I went with a system76 machine for my next laptop?
Since I've only seen a couple of data points, I'm curious if you have anything to add about the thermals and whether it's something worth considering as I'm looking around for a new desktop.
(In that spirit, I need to look into moving off Ubuntu in response to self-promotion being added to system commands.)
Really wish I had enough money for a System76 PC. Go on there at least 10 times a year and build out a PC or two just to dream...
Sorry for abandoning my cart with ridiculous PC specs built for one of those hoodie wearing hackers in media photos.
Edit: I'm posting too fast so for the person commenting on what boards they use...
https://tech-docs.system76.com - here is your answer.
However, if you configure a computer and add a keyboard, add the whole thing to your cart, then go into your cart and remove the computer, the keyboard is still there and you can proceed to checkout.
I'm not sure if this is intentional.
I’m not sure why there isn’t a tab in their nav bar, but they’re featured on the home page.
It sounds condescending of them to omit the exact model names of their hardware in their 'tech specs' section. I, for one, would like to know what exact model of motherboard I would be getting when I choose 'AMD' or 'Intel Advanced' in the 'Platform' section. Same goes for RAM, SSD, etc.
On this one you can see they use a Gigabyte X299 Aorus Ultra Gaming Pro.
However, it's common to do replacements, so am exact model is only going to be possible with bespoke systems IME.
Did you try asking, most people only want a specific bundle of features and don't care about the model numbers per se.
--start of comment--
[quote]does S76 announces they're targetting to recreate their own desktop from scratcch, or they "just modify things" whom are not really good with the gnome desktop of today, keeping the rest (running GTK if Im well)? [/quote]
Official communication(1) says "we're doing to do our own desktop because gnome extensions are too breakable". Indeed, Cosmic-desktop was until there a gnome modified, with extensions, whom can by definition(2) be bugged/breaked/misfunctionnal at each gnome update. This decision could be comprehensible for a company who install it on computers to sell.
But I think we might not forget the fuming writing(3) that Chris Davies published shortly afterwards. As explained, some S76 devs badmouth a bit regarding Gnome devs riding their bad reputation (not diserved at all imho) and of lost-minded nerds flooding the r/gnome subreddit and comments on OMGubuntu. The announce of Cosmic being rewrited in Rust has been then shown as a divorce between S76 and gnome, on the exclusive wrongdoing of that last one. It personnaly a view whom makes me sick, as some people said it here already. Budgie said more or less the same thing announcing last december they will re-write their desktop environnment in ELF(4), accusing the GtK project of being running for the particular interests of Gnome[teams]. It's very hard for me to see that as something else than a true and real bad faith. Few years earlier, Linux Mint and elementary, decided their own desktop environnment in replacement of Gnome, and the three projects has followed a distinct path while keeping a good harmony (and staying based on GTK!)
it's very frustrating to see those quarrels blocking on the path of the linux desktop adoption, because it's really about it : we're not talking here about niche desktops like sway or lxqt, but about what can permit to a huge amount of users to emancipate of microsoft and Apple. If it's still considered as a relevant idea.
1: omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/11/system76-is-building-its-own-desktop-environment
2: wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey-Patch
3: linuxfr.org/users/anonyme/liens/system76-a-case-study-on-how-not-to-collaborate-with-upstream
blogs.gnome.org/christopherdavis/2021/11/10/system76-how-not-to-collaborate/
4: joshuastrobl.com/2021/09/14/building-an-alternative-ecosystem/
--end of comment--
this is the reason why, on my own, I litterally prefer LMDE, with openbsd and haiku to accompany.
[quote]does S76 announces they're targetting to recreate their own desktop from scratcch, or they "just modify things" whom are not really good with the gnome desktop of today, keeping the rest (running GTK if Im well)? [/quote]
Official communication(1) says "we're doing to do our own desktop because gnome extensions are too breakable". Indeed, Cosmic-desktop was until there a gnome modified, with extensions, whom can by definition(2) be bugged/breaked/misfunctionnal at each gnome update. This decision could be comprehensible for a company who install it on computers to sell.
But I think we might not forget the fuming writing(3) that Chris Davies published shortly afterwards. As explained, some S76 devs badmouth a bit regarding Gnome devs riding their bad reputation (not diserved at all imho) and of lost-minded nerds flooding the r/gnome subreddit and comments on OMGubuntu. The announce of Cosmic being rewrited in Rust has been then shown as a divorce between S76 and gnome, on the exclusive wrongdoing of that last one. It personnaly a view whom makes me sick, as some people said it here already. Budgie said more or less the same thing announcing last december they will re-write their desktop environnment in ELF(4), accusing the GtK project of being running for the particular interests of Gnome[teams]. It's very hard for me to see that as something else than a true and real bad faith. Few years earlier, Linux Mint and elementary, decided their own desktop environnment in replacement of Gnome, and the three projects has followed a distinct path while keeping a good harmony (and staying based on GTK!)
it's very frustrating to see those quarrels blocking on the path of the linux desktop adoption, because it's really about it : we're not talking here about niche desktops like sway or lxqt, but about what can permit to a huge amount of users to emancipate of microsoft and Apple. If it's still considered as a relevant idea.
1: www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2021/11/system76-is-building-its-own-desktop-environment
2: fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey-Patch
3: linuxfr.org/users/anonyme/liens/system76-a-case-study-on-how-not-to-collaborate-with-upstream
blogs.gnome.org/christopherdavis/2021/11/10/system76-how-not-to-collaborate/
4: joshuastrobl.com/2021/09/14/building-an-alternative-ecosystem/
--end of comment--
this is the reason why, on my own, I litterally prefer LMDE, with openbsd and haiku to accompany.
Just wanted to compare their Thelio mini PC to my last PC setup in a NCASE M1* Mini-ITX case and found that their 'tech specs' page (intentionally?) lacking.
*NCASE M1 cases are discontinued, but are widely available secondhand.
A such-afflicted laptop will be missing the s2idle that you see querying /sys here: https://www.togaware.com/linux/survivor/sleep-modes.html
I wouldn't doubt that the claims are real; I can easily go a whole day of programming without needing a recharge on my lg gram, which was likewise advertised as having oodles of hours. If I'm careful with my usage, I could easily push 16. As it is, I've got two instances of chrome (different profiles), three instances of VS code, a server running, docker and postgres in the background, sitting at around 48% battery remaining and I haven't plugged in to charge in about 8 hours or so.
I do usually have an external mouse on my desk when I'm using it at home, but the trackpad has been fine on the go. I've never noticed a problem with it.
Speakers are fine or hearing things in videos, etc., but I generally put on bluetooth headphones and/or a stereo system to listen to music. Bluetooth connects within 2 seconds of me turning on my Bose headphones. I think a lot of people don't like the speakers on this thing, and they're admittedly not as good as my VCR-sized Dell 2011 XPS with built-in minisubwoofer.
Webcam works great, but won't win any awards.
Screen brightness is good. Look and feel is good. Weight is excellent. Keyboard backlight is great. USB-C charging is great. Endurance seems good (I've had mine daily driving since 2020).
The only issue I've had was early one when I typed one key sequence too fast, sometimes there would be an extra letter thrown in there, but they fixed it in firmware.
On the note of high-quality hardware produced by other manufacturers, the HP Dev One which ships with Pop!_OS might be attractive to people who are looking for a supported system with very nice hardware: https://www.wired.com/review/hp-dev-one-linux-laptop/
Sub-par Linux laptops got me to switch back to a Mac full time a year ago. Battery life is insanely good and the screen resolution is much better (I need lots of pixels for the larger fonts I increasingly need)
Xorg supports some scaling methods that macOS doesn't, which meansv you can scale fonts arbitrarily without a HiDPI screen. As someone with severe (but so far mostly correctable) vision problems (high myopia, mild astigmatism, small cataracts, some photophobia, moderate colorblindness) who has used recent MBPs, 1080p is still fine for me on Linux laptops. I don't find that vthe fancy Mac screens really add much in terms of readability, as nice as they are.
So I was fine for another two years on Ubuntu until another dist-upgrade broke everything again. Sensing a pattern, I decided to give Pop a try.
I'm now about a year into Pop and sure enough, a few weeks ago a dist-upgrade broke a lot of things, but unlike Ubuntu, I was able to find System76's tech support page, I ran the commands it suggested, and everything's fine again!
https://support.system76.com/articles/package-manager-ubuntu...
Miraculous, I tell you.
I still can't figure out why there are multiple versions of some things in the Pop Shop, but they all seem to work, so I'm not complaining, it's just weird. Someday I'll figure out this whole tiling-windows thing, but I think that's for people with bigger screens so I turned it off so my alt-tab reflexes work again.
In general, it just works, and that's more than I can say for Windows or Ubuntu at this point.
Getting familiar with nix can take some time. e.g. figuring out how to write a Nix package if there's not a package already can be difficult.
When things work in NixOS, it really does feel very nice to know you have a declared config (so that you don't have to worry about what changes you made). When things don't work in NixOS, it may be quite demanding/challenging to fix.
It's a little bit of a double edged sword. NixOS lets me use pretty much straight upstream packages, which sometimes break due to not having thorough integration testing like a traditional distro would. On the other hand, I was able to just boot up an older configuration to get back to functional, and that let me figure out wtf was wrong.
[1]: https://github.com/mzur/gnome-shell-wsmatrix/issues/236
It's a waste of time learning all the debug and repair steps. With NixOS nothing breaks. No need to waste brain cells.
I realized how great it was when a friend asked me to fix his windows computer and I realized I had no idea that computers even broke in those ways anymore.
Other than that, NixOS is a godsend.
There were also a couple janky bugs at the time, but perhaps they've been fixed now. The cool thing its it's so darn easy to switch back and forth!
"Miraculous" belongs on Windows or OSX, not Linux.
The technology itself is nothing special. Knowing that it may break, and positioning resources where search engines can find them, and making the resources readable enough to understand which one to try first, is what sets System76 apart here.
When I ran into the same problem on Ubuntu I wasted a week using my other machine to search forums, mailing lists, bug tracker tickets, visit IRC channels (and then leave the machine on to lurk in the channel in case of a reply...), and try any web result I could find that seemed to address my issue. I sunk probably 30 or 40 hours in, and made zero progress, before finally giving up and deciding to install fresh and restore /home/ from backup. I'm sure the resources were out there for someone who knew what to search for, but that's one of the things about being a Linux idiot, I've only been doing this a few years and I've found it incredibly hard to learn the art of divination to resolve "half my apps crash on start" to "package manager problem". There's just no hand-holding for that, you're expected to just know it.
> you cause breakage without ever gaining the knowledge of why.
Exactly.
The acute irony is that I strongly suspect that the Pop_OS support page may have fixed my broken Ubuntu installations too, but I didn't find it while I was searching for Ubuntu issues.
I actually use tiling the most in my small screens.... because I effectively have 1 or two windows full screen or split. It's the hotkeys that make it really slick
Most end user issues with upgrade breakage on Debian downstreams like Ubuntu and Pop!_OS wouldn't be serious problems for experienced Debian users.
Furthermore, you don't even have to install Pop!_OS to get Pop!_Shell. For example my preferred distribution is openSUSE Tumbleweed with GNOME, so I just need to
sudo zypper install gnome-shell-extension-pop-shell
wget https://github.com/pop-os/shell/raw/master_jammy/scripts/configure.sh
# configure.sh mostly configures keyboard shortcuts. Inspect it before running.
sh ./configure.sh
hopefully they keep maintaining it for gnome after they release cosmic.
I’m curious how System76 sees Pop_OS fitting into their business model which is primarily hardware.
Thats how you make something that doesnt look good or function that well because you're focusing on too much.
They are taking the Apple path with linux. Make the hardware and make the software tailored for the hardware for a great experience. Yes they support people installing on stuff other than their hardware, but they make sure their hardware is supported and runs well.
I feel like its polish combined with its hardline stance against snaps makes it an easy choice to switch to for Ubuntu users.
system76 is a name that often comes up when you ask about linux laptops. so i decided to try their galago pro. and i have to be honest here. as a long time macbook user, this is definitely a downgrade for the price. especially when you can get an M1 and a better experience for the same price.
the trackpad is weird and does not work well. i apply too much pressure for my clicks to register. my taps, however, would register with me barely touching the pad, or finger scrolling. i have disabled tapping. and natural scrolling does not feel natural.
now, having page-up and page-down keys above the left and right arrow keys is a bad idea. it gives a bad user experience.
but of course, it's linux, you can remap the keys. you need a handful of commands for that. and since you are on a custom OS, you need to look at the base OSes. lucky me, someone wrote a blog post for ubuntu.
system76's discord is not (in my experience) where you get help. it is full of people who will ignore you. my impression is that they live in a bubble and are all doing similar things. you get the silent treatment for not doing things their way.
not sure what people are happy about with pop!_os. i spend my time looking through ubuntu and debian documentation. pop!_os docs are a series of articles and they are lacking. i am happy with what ubuntu and debian are doing! this custom OS does not make much difference in my opinion.
all that said, i will continue to support system76.
so much +1 for the worst possible alignment of the keys above the arrow keys, is why mine is not used anymore it just pisses me off constantly. (i reprogrammed the keyboard but it still is a bad experience even when disabled or remapped) the speakers on the bottom are also not doing a great either. i think i will get a framework as the next one. Also PopOS is confusing to configure, much rather have plain debian and live with the pain of setting it up, but it behaves deterministic.
But they got NIH* syndrome and started this COSMIC desktop; UI changed, the whole experience changed, more bugs ruin our lives. And then they got "Let's rebuild everything in Rust" fever and the great experience of Pop_OS + Pop_Shell was lost forever.
I understand the needs of creating unique experience for a product, but they could have built their desktop on top of Gnome like Ubuntu is doing or using the Gnome stack like Cinnamon, Elementary and many others. Or, if Gnome is a problem for them, they could have chosen the KDE stack, since KDE community is friendlier to outsiders.
* Not invented here
Canonical already tried this with Unity8 and failed in a time they had much more popularity and community support than System76.
It's been a few months and I must say that it's what I've been looking for in a Linux distro. Something predictable, stable, that has good out of the box defaults and runs great for some games as well. For anyone looking to switch from Windows, I can't recommend it enough. Anyone else using the desktop/laptop also feel right at home starting up a few programs, editing a document or a picture and watching videos and pictures (that's really what most average users do anyway). It's also really great to be able to switch between tiling and non-tiling modes with one keyboard shortcut, which gives me a lot of the things I loved in i3wm/regolith while keeping it usable for average Joe (I'll never forget the confusion on the face of a friend opening up a picture and trying to resize the window as it was taking up half the screen next to Firefox).
Great job to the Pop Os team!
They don't seem to have a replacement URL up.
Bluetooth sometimes won't connect to some things, but that was true of Ubuntu too. And I've never really relied on it for much anyway as I always find it a bit of a crap shoot whether devices in general will see each other or pair. So no great loss.
I dont like people saying that they have "developed an OS" when all they have done is to create derivative distribution of Ubuntu which itself rests on Debian.
How about:
""" We have created a great distribution of Linux and we have added some brand-new components to it and we think you will really like it.
We think it is the best distribution for our customers and a great distribution for new users
Since it is based upon the highly popular Ubuntu distribution a lot of experienced users will feel right at home as well. """
I hope their work on (a fork?) of GNOME becomes great.
The bit about implementing NTP seems odd to me.
The only thing I dislike is their shell, the ugly pastel colors are really off putting along with some weird design choices and it wasn't very stable the last time I tried it a few years ago.
Makes me wonder why ZorinOS isn't as popular even though it has existed for twice as long. Maybe because of a lacking hardware company behind it? I think ZorinOS is a more consumer friendly distro than Pop!_OS (which I consider a nerd distro) and might have a better chance at being accepted as a mainstream distro than the others I've tried.
I want to support System76, but I read some not so positive anecdotes about their laptop's build quality, so went with the Thinkpad. I also wanted/needed a centered keyboard layout without numberpad, which they don't offer. Their desktop models look nice, but feel like a luxury when I can get a custom-built PC and just install Linux on it.
Anyway, Pop OS is wonderful. I actually installed it on the old MBP too, and gave it new life.
In addition: the Nordic theme makes for a beautiful interface, it's like what macOS should have become.
I love Linux but wish it wasn’t such a pain and required blowing up installs every so often. By contrast, not once have I had to blow up a Mac OS instance to stabilize it.
I had a loaner laptop briefly when the screen went out. Loaner laptop battery lasted all day. I don't remember the model though
Gtk, Qt, XFCE, GNOME and KDE applications will look out of place in the new desktop, and most likely they will never create a Rust based set of frameworks that can match the above ones on features, development tooling, and extensibility points for desktop developers.
I'm a nerd but that doesn't mean I have time to mess with bugs.
The second thing was that I couldn't figure out my way from debian.org, to the relevant ISO to download. There's just so many options, scattered explanations, I felt overwhelmed by the site and couldn't figure it out reliably.
The third thing is the out of box experience. Every major Debian descendant has this mentioned in the articles that compare them. Ubuntu is like a refined, user friendly Debian. Mint further polishes Ubuntu. Elementary is designed for newbies and to have excellent OOTB experience. And so on.
Fourth thing, that Debian Stable seems to be behind in version numbers, and Debian Testing seems to be not stable enough. Maybe these are not true, but they haven't inspired confidence in me either.
Fifth, Debian came with some proprietary things off by default, so no WIFI on my laptop, no MP3, bluetooth, other minor inconveniences. I love open source, but I'm not a purist, and I wanted to make use of my computer first, and improve on it later.
After Ubuntu pushing their current in-house bullshit again (snaps this time), and Mint behaving weird on my main computer for some reason (maybe the multiple release upgrades), I took the plunge into Debian after some research, and ended up on using Debian Testing with KDE. So far, the experience has been good, but this really feels like a Linux enthusiast's distro, where I had to look up things on the Internet, because the installed just haven't explained anything - me, with 10+ years of Linux experience, ending up with installing a system that won't boot into the graphical desktop, despite selecting the KDE option in the installer!
I occasionally talk to a Debian user. Ask how they handle their long term Debian use. Which usually takes them several minutes to describe. XYZ from stable, ABC from unstable, track the latest with foo from testing, and bar from backports. Basically they end up with a custom setup, unlike any other on the planet, and that hasn't been tested.
LTS on the other hand does get testing, generally I just apt install the packages I need, and then do-release upgrade every 2 years. LTS is popular enough that generally if I google the problem there's a quick fix, and a large fraction of LTS users don't seem to customize their repos to the degree that seems common on Debian.
a) Their (now changing) stance against unfree firmware files. This made the default adverdised installer fail most laptop installations due to the WIFI firmware not being available, so no internet to pull down the required packages to make it work. There were unofficial ISOs, but they were hard to find and so a frustrating experience if you didn't know about it. Same, but not as worse with other unfree stuff, like NVidia drivers, you are required to enable the non-free repos, which makes totally sense if you check it out more closely but still a bump in the road for users new(er) to Linux or only used Debian derivatives that often have a stance that is (relatively) less freedom oriented. As hinted, the firmware situation recently changed and will get better with the next major release next year.
b) It's more universal and flexible to go in various direction, so it comes with a less opinionated out-of-the-box experience, for the better or worse (depending on your preferences). For example, Ubuntu provides a Server and a Desktop edition, and then all the semi-official Desktop spins for KDE, XFCE, ..., but Debian doesn't you can get it to move in either direction quite easily once you grasp its basics, but that naturally still is an overhead compared to just pulling a preconfigured "ready to fly" version ISO.
c) It is definitively is sturdier, but due to their policies guaranteeing that it's also less bleeding edge, well at least if you use the stable release. You can run the Debian Sid version (unstable), but the project doesn't want to promote that to inexperienced users. FWIW, I run that on my laptops since years and got an excellent experience. It's a rolling edge version of Debian, fresh as Arch, but I just align a bit better with Debian (plus develop on it at work).
There are surely some more, but those where the biggest three popping into my head.
The great thing about Debian, they got quite a healthy relationship to most of their derivatives. Which could IMO only happen due to not being run by a major company or the like, but 100% community based. While that sometimes makes for slow turning mills, but still (or maybe exactly because of that) an excellent and safe foundation for their users, be it direct ones or indirect through derivatives.
I think the Debian distro has always targeted/attracted free software purists.
Very inconsistent behavior for installation: flatpaks require no specific rights but normal packages require sudo password. Not a good UX in that regard.
1. Slack is a snap. Do you have to run it in the browser? I don't know if desktop sharing works well there, it's been years since I only used their app (Electron?)
2. Is flatpack optional or are there some mandatory flatpack apps that are part of the system? I'd like a deb only system.
3. Contrary to some of us I don't want to use a tiling window manager. Can I keep using my heavily customized Gnome Shell or do I have to use whatever System 76 created for Pop_OS?
To zoom out - the reasons desktop Linux is not adopted on a wider scale have nothing to do with its technological prowess. It's working as well as any other desktop OS would. The reasons are rather political, and especially business-related. With making schools teach Windows and MS Office, giving governments and public offices deals, having vendors bundle it by default to new computers, not enforcing anti-piracy, is the way Microsoft achieved that their software is the desktop standard, not by making the software superior in specialized contexts like a uniform UI, or a better architecture. Their blend of adequate software, vertical integration, ruthless business, and some support for every type of user is what won them their current status.
The issue ain't different WMs or toolkits, but a lock-in effort from Microsoft with HW and SW vendors, they still had to create WSL to actually improve their dev experience though, could not manage that without.
Most people ain't technical experienced or interested in IT and just don't care enough to actively switch their OS, so they use what's shipped with it, if it was a Linux Distro they would just use that.
The cleverness of WSL is that Microsoft came to realise, thanks to Apple, thank many folks only care about having a POSIX userland and don't really care about Linux as such.
Given that current generations mix up Linux with UNIX, it made more business sense to add Linux compatibility than revive SUA.
So now those folks mostly jump between Apple and Microsoft platforms instead of supporting Linux OEMs as they should in first place, genius.
As long as they provide matching themes for QT and GTK it should be fine.
Like always many of these experiences fail short by focusing on Look and leaving out the other 90% of the development experience.
Electron is a plague equally in all OSs
But I think the current trend is moving windows to be a VM/partition for gaming
* Some of you will get the reference.
One of my favorite lesser benefits of using NixOS is that running a big system upgrade doesn't even stop you from installing software while it's running. Realize you need a new program while your system upgrade is running? No problem! Add it to your NixOS configuration for posterity if you like, then run it in a Nix shell or install it to your user profile. No need to interrupt the upgrade or wait until it's over.
In a way, I think most of the "I tried Nix/NixOS but didn't stick with it" comments are about its learning curve.
I'd make comparisons to other tools: VSCode does the job pretty well without having to learn anything, but many people will learn tools like vim, & emacs. (The latter isn't just out of legacy; kakoune & helix seem pretty neat).
Still, I'd gate these power-user tools behind "you need to take the time to learn them", rather than a general recommendation.
- there are no types in nix
- the debugging capabilities are limited
- there is no "slot" concept nor the edges of dependecy graphs may be tagged
- it's hard to make contributions because they press on you a lot about minor formalities, e.g.they require you to squash commits manually and deliberately don't want to enable one-click squash in Github settings, P/Rs and issues are getting ignored (even critical/security issues), etc.
I would bet money that most people who are singing praise for NixOS have sunk significant time into absorbing the whole NixOS way of doing things, learning the Nix language, tinkering with their machine config, diagnosing non-trivial problems, etc.
It is just a smaller community and younger project. NixOS is nowhere neat as stable. The security story is, comparatively, simply not present (e.g. there is no equivalent of https://www.debian.org/security/ that I can find). The user base is tiny in comparison. Packaging up stuff for NixOS often requires non-trivial patches, downright hacks, or wrapper scripts for binaries that can break assumptions made by upstream and lead to little paper cut issues.
NixOS is many things, but it isn't a Debian Stable. They fill different roles. Debian is a mainstream distribution, and the problems you'll have will be similar to the problems most people have, so you'll be swimming with the tide and be able to find help. I see NixOS more as a rolling release distro that gives you a mechanism and programming language to control configuration and rollback, but a lot of those 80K NixOS packages are just kinda sitting there packaged up in a way that kinda worked at some point but isn't really solid.
I use Nix as a package manager on top of Debian, to bring in development tools, etc. This is relatively easy. When I tried using it as an OS I had to spend way too much time figuring out weird issues.
* Bleeding edge packages
* Bleeding edge alternative packages (Try wayland an pipewire without being scared)
* Upgrades that doesn't evaluate changes nothing (except disk space)
* Upgrades that evaluates but doesn't work ("never" happens) are atomic and can be rolled back from (unless you mess with boot, but even then booting NixOS livecd, mounting things up and running the install command will get you back)
* Things that aren't in your config doesn't exist in your system
* Identical systems across machines (with configurable differences)
The difference is huge, but some things are a pain in the ass, so I use "distrobox" too for small one-off things, it manages podman to set up an OS container for me that shares my homedir and such (so I get all my dot files in there too)
* You'll learn to appreciate systemd
* You'll eventually learn a bit of FP
* Once something works, it keeps working.
There are more pros, and I didn't list any cons, but with fistrobox you can hide many warts where your FP skills are lacking.
So to answer your question, upgrades between versions will probably always break for you, but they'll break on build time, so you fix them (mostly deprecated/moved options) and then it's all fine and dandy, rather than your system being broken.
Isn't there a more reasonable middle-ground, e.g. just saying "we officially support Ubuntu / Fedora" or something like that, and making sure those two distros actually work well out of the box?
As an anecdote, I have got my framework laptop this summer, and it works really well out of the box pretty much anywhere. I'd argue that framework is a pretty direct competitor to system76, except framework seems to be innovating on the hardware part rather than the Linux distro part. Which makes way more sense business-wise to me.
And the tiling extension is off by default. It's just a little toggle in the (very nice) settings dialog to turn it on or off. You can totally uninstall it too as it's just a regular gnome extension (and you can even install it right now on non-pop gnome 3 systems).
2. I'm not sure how mandatory flatpak is. I suspect it's optional, but I'd suggest testing removal on a non-essential install before committing to it.
3. The tiling feature is completely optional and can be disabled easily in the settings.
I would count this as not breaking. I mean... on most systems, you are borked if an upgrade fails and now need to boot a live CD. I've never had that happen on NixOS. I had it happen only once, and that was due to a bad ZFS setting that the OS couldn't possibly have fixed (weird BIOS thing where the SATA drives came up incorrectly).
Ubuntu works well as long as you install an LTS release and then only upgrade to the next LTS at the end of the support window for the previous release.
Tangentially, I'm getting bored of my desktop environment, and wouldn't mind mixing things up. I've been using cinnamon. I am hesitant to try KDE because of all the GUI dependencies it would presumably install.
I've been very happy with Manjaro KDE Plasma which I installed maybe two years ago. It's been my main OS since then and I've never had a single problem.
When I installed it on my somewhat unpopular laptop it was the only distro that "just worked". I tried Pop!_OS, Fedora, KDE Neon, EndeavourOS and Kubuntu and some other ones without luck. Pop!_OS didn't even boot.
On Manjaro everything (except for Nvidia graphics) just worked. From thunderbolt to sleep and display switching. The Nvidia setup could've be smoother (needed a slew of terminal commands), but once set up it works. Actually it was my dad that recommended Manjaro as he had exactly the same experience with his laptop.
Debian based distros has given me headaches every time I try to dist-upgrade (following every recommended step). It's still a mystery how that process can be so unreliable considering Debian has been around for ~30 years. It was not long ago that I broke Raspberry Pi OS at dist-upgrade. Luckily, Manjaro KDE Plasma is available for the Pi as well.
Manjaro gives me rolling releases and stability. openSUSE Tumbleweed looks kind of interesting, but Manjaro is working and and at this time in life I've got better things to do than to distro hop.
However, I'm an old DOS nerd so mashing keys on boot is one of the first things I try. Pop has a bootloader that let me revert to the previous something, I guess that's an older kernel? And that loaded right up and got me into the GUI and all my apps worked and everything. So from there I found the "incomplete upgrade" support page, ran those commands, and rebooted again and tried the newer kernel again, and it came right up, all fixed.
But thanks ;)
Have been around the Linux world long enough, all the way back to Slackware 2.0, and when getting FOSS software meant buying CDs from Walnut Creek.
The point is entirely different: if you update the channel-list you need the network for any changes to the configuration and I don't know of a way to go back to an earlier channel state.
`nix-channel` does have a `--rollback` flag to it.
However, I feel that Nix Flakes would allow you a better experience. With nix flakes, the revision of the nixpkgs input is persisted in a lockfile. You could check this file in somewhere, and then getting your working directory back to a known working state is much easier.
Unless you erase your darlings: https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings
Well, except for the crappy BT audio, but IIUC that problem isn't listed to Pop_OS.
Depends on if they've updated to PipeWire or not. PulseAudio/ALSA are terrible at negotiating Bluetooth connections, but PipeWire has been rock-solid in my experience. Since Pop is still on x11 they probably haven't updated yet, but it's likely coming soon.
I know vaguely that flatpak is "like docker" in terms of wrapping dependencies.
I have no clue how that translates to missing features of compatibility issues with other apps.
Even knowing which is more up to date isn't shown. Or why i should pick one over the other.
The multiple packaging types confounded my efforts to debug an issue I had with VLC, as i initially thought it was a flatpak permissions problem.. No evidence, just hearsay by what i'd seen of flatpak in general online.
All that said, the kernel emulation layer that WSL1 was built on was originally intended to run Android apps.
Project Astoria is coming back on Windows 11.
And yes, Android apps are already there on Win11, so it kinda came full circle. But either way, the point is that emulating Linux kernel was originally a choice made for the sake of Android compatibility. That it ended up providing a much-needed development environment is a fortunate side effect of that decision.
This is not a support forum and we're not trying to diagnose and fix someone's issue. It's just not that hard to get into trouble with NixOS and there's still a room for improvement, that's all.
Reading on `nix-channel --rollback`, it should definitely help in some cases and I don't know how I missed it, maybe the docs weren't clear it's not tied to config generations or I just didn't pay enough attention.
And if the packaging difference does matter (as it did for my vlc issue, one solution only worked for the deb), then an explanation for newbies should be given as to the general expectations for each package type.
Or should I just "git gud" and go digging through ppa/flathub? mailing lists to find a 2013 reply to a post?
Like for example I've been playing with Kodi and as a deb package you can't install some (but not all) add-ons through the built in UI, you have to go find special apt packages for them and install those outside the Kodi UI. Nowhere is this documented or visible to users--Kodi's webpage doesn't concern itself with how Debian packages it so no mention there, and Debian itself is a black hole of information for end users. The exact same issue is present with RetroArch and its Debian packages version. My bottom line is I always pick a deb package as the very last option and expect pain or confusion when doing so.
> or should I just "git gud"
The opposite. Just blindly click on one. If it works you are done, if not click on a different one.
You are really, really overcomplicating this for no reason.
Same with selinux: Lots of "advice" was just to turn it off completely.
> You would have no idea why
Yes, file a bug to get it fixed instead of leaving other users standing in the rain.