Pop_OS by System76 | Hacker News Reader

Pop_OS by System76

system76.com

60 pointsplg31 comments

What's the benefit/reasoning here for another distro? I just want rock-solid hardware with strong Linux compatibility. It seems like the man-hours would be better spent contributing to drivers to ensure stability and accessibility across all Linux distributions.

Which is why the year of desktop Linux will never happen, because everyone wants to differentiate their product.

The way things went with netbooks and nowadays with Android, Jolla, Tizen,... shows what happens when OEMs try to sell Linux distributions.

I can clearly imagine Dell Linux, HP Linux, MS Linux, Huawei Linux, Samsung Linux, .... each with their own "value added" and update policies.

Dell has been pushing plain Ubuntu for a while I think.

Their 13 XPS laptops are always out of stock in Germany, so I never managed to try them out.

ASUS used to sell 1215B ones with Ubuntu on the German Amazon store, which I managed to get for travel purposes.

But in spite of those two examples, I don't see most OEMs would play ball regarding OEM distributions and updates.

Did this not work for Android? I seem to recall that every Android phone manufacturer shipped their own customized Android with different home screens, navigation, widgets, apps, etc. Did not stop consumers from buying the phones. Even today the number of Android phones released with stock Android each year is laughably low.

Not at all, unless you mean that the current situation of only getting updates when paying at least 800 € for 2 + 1 model is a good one.

Imagine getting a OEM Linux with such update model, using closed source drivers bound to the distribution kernel.

Well, this seems target users that are more interested in making something new - it had a strong developer/ advanced user message.

While I too find it a bit odd to call it OS I am very much in favour of doing UI research on distros like this instead of in Ubuntu default.

I wonder what that website says. Every time I tried to scroll it got stuck for four seconds, put my CPU to 100%, and then jumped way further up/down than I'd expect.

New definition of OS: theme + shortcuts + Linux. I understand that they want to control the UI, why not just release a package that anyone can install on top of the preferred Linux distro?

Yet another bloated distro based upon ubuntu with no tangible value brought to you by a company who (for the longest time) required a support package to be installed on top of stock ubuntu. I suspect them rolling this distro is due to the fact that many of their offerings have discrete graphics and non-free wifi.

Isn't there a System 76 guy building the Rust based OS (redox, if I recall correctly)?

Personally, that seems more interesting to me. With this, why not just stick with existing distros?

Yes, that is true.

(I don't know anything about Pop_OS, so can't comment there)

That's me

This seems to have some interesting tools baked into it. Is S76 really innovating here or is this just a remix and reskin of tools already available?

Along the same lines, I'd love to know if they have power savings, fan control, or other configuration refinements baked into this (or available to pull into other distros) for their hardware line.

It's just standard Gnome with user installable theme and icons. Well that they preinstall. I would not call this OS but more like UI bundle.

No mention of GNOME at all? Is this part of the marketing strategy? Wondering what the GNOME folks think about this.

Some great visuals of Gnome there guys.

Yeah I wonder if the Gnome guys can use all this material for their commercials. I didn't really see any non-Gnome fancy-ness.

The mission goal is right and honorable, but I hope they don't let their web designers anywhere near the operating system UIs.

I would like to see a more radical approach towards a productivity/creativity OS though, so far it looks like just another Linux distro.

That webpage made my Chrome crawled to a halt. Had to use Safari instead.

I had a system76 so I'd definitely never try this. Fooled me once.

Looks like Ubuntu minus few apps plus new theme {-:

They seem to be pitching Linux to Windows/Mac user, I don't think people on HN are the target market.

That looks neat. Is there a downside to using a non-mainstream distribution?

> Is there a downside to using a non-mainstream distribution?

There are three things I can think of immediately that would make me skeptical about using a new distro vs one of the more established ones:

1) I would be worried about the maintainers supporting it with timely updates (especially around security)

2) I would be interested in how it is configured out of the box, from a security perspective and if it's a derivative of one of the mainstream distros then what changes are they making?

3) I would be interested in how they plan to work with upstream communities (i.e. that they do NOT follow the Canonical/Ubuntu model).

> The OS is based on Ubuntu

Oh. That's too bad.

> That looks neat. Is there a downside to using a non-mainstream distribution?

The useless, information-free response to a lot of end user requests for help on Linux tends to be "try a different distribution." If that happens 20% of the time to users of a popular distribution who ask a question online - that figure is just a guess - I can only imagine how often it will happen to users of an obscure distro.

"We're developing an OS"

"It's linux"

Boring.

I don’t know why you were downvoted because you are right. This is a distro. It’s not even a new userland as far as I understand... it’s just a linux distro.

What they do have is a nice marketing team. Gnome should have nice gifs like that.

GNOME could just use those gifs. It's plain gnome, I have this in Debian 9, or am I missing something?

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