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Comment by rkido | Hacker News Reader

This looks cool. But why do they keep marketing Pop!_OS as a different operating system? This is confusing to people who don't realize that it's literally just a customized Ubuntu.

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> But why do they keep marketing Pop!_OS as a different operating system? This is confusing to people who don't realize that it's literally just a customized Ubuntu.

Why do they keep marketing Ubuntu as a different OS? The is confusing to people who don't realize that it's literally just a customized Debian.

> Why do they keep marketing Ubuntu as a different OS? The is confusing to people who don't realize that it's literally just a customized Debian.

Why do they keep marketing Debian as a different OS? It is literally just Linux and some GNU system components cobbled together.

Indeed, why don't they actually put Linux front and centre, since by this point in time it should be a fairly well recognised name. They could then say something about Pop_OS in term of their own customisation if they like, but I find the down-playing of Linux a bit odd, especially as they do note the case design as including "the solar system at the time of the Unix Epoch", which is a nice Vingian touch.

Linux is a fairly well-recognized name by this point, but what recognition it does have tends to have "technical" associations.

If I suggest running Linux to some of my friends, they'll immediately disregard it as something they wouldn't be able to use, possibly because they know I run it and associate it with being a techie. I suspect I would get a very different reaction if I showed them something like elementary OS without even mentioning the word Linux.

Perhaps. But what if you mention "Pop" "<bang>" "<underscore>" "OS"?

Let's be honest here. Everybody familiar with System76 (slight exaggeration, but mostly correct) is somebody looking outside the box. There's a good chance they already use Linux and understand Pop is just a customized distro. These systems are largely marketed to the power user who doesn't want to build their own PC. In other words, someone who wants to pay a fair price for a good Linux laptop with functioning hardware and a company to support it. They know it won't have bleeding edge performance, but should have good performance. They are comfortable with computers and probably know Windows and a few Linux distros like Ubuntu, RHEL, Arch...etc.

I still think Pop!_OS is not a household name even among the smaller set of people you refer to.

I am their target customer (I recently bought a very similar machine to these from Boxx), and I have no idea what Pop!_OS is. I can guess, based on the 18.something LTS that it's a Ubuntu derivative, but I don't know what that involves.

I'm pretty sure it's an add-on repo to Ubuntu which contains customisation of GNOME Shell and some System76-specific firmware stuff. (I have a System76 desktop from a few years back, but haven't run Ubuntu or System76's custom repo for some time on it, so I'm not 100% certain.)

Yeah, as far as I can tell, that's what it seems to be. But there's some breathless hype stuff about it that's obfuscating stuff on their site even though I'm their target audience.

Yea, but I clicked around and did a quick Google to find out it's a custom distro. Not too hard, but I guess they could make that easier.

APT and dpkg really makes it different. Changes the whole character vs say redhat and their RPMs.

Every single binary that works on Ubuntu will work without modification on Pop!_OS.

That is not true for Debian. Some packages (like the .deb file for Chrome or VSCode) should work on any distribution that supports dpkg, but there are many packages that break compatibility between Ubuntu and Debian. Thus Ubuntu isn't just a customized Debian; it's a customization that creates a distinct operating system.

Yeah, they need to re-arrange their Pop page (https://system76.com/pop). Put the "workflow streamlined" and the "apps" graphics at the top. Put the scary matrix movie command line and CUDA + Tensorflow to the bottom.

I think the idea of Pop is that it's for people like scientists and engineers who need to use their machine as a tool for computation, but may have no knowledge or interest in system administration. Likely quite comfortable on the command line, but also likely couldn't tell you what systemd is or how to use iptables.

For many people in that audience "Linux Distro where the latest CUDA just works" is a huge selling point. That is unfortunately not guaranteed to be true of Ubuntu, necessarily, although things have gotten better.

I just switched to it recently and am very happy, it feels like it was perfectly designed for how I use the computer.

...You may have just sold me on it.

Me too, tested it today and I like what I see.

It seems to work very well on my laptop. I would say it is the first real innovation in distros in years.

So it seems to be working well on what I assume is not a System76 system? Because that's another thing I was wondering. I don't want the issues of a Hackintosh (OS targeted for a small number of builds) but for Linux.

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