Comment by tonysickpony | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tonysickpony | Hacker News Reader

I love Pop!_OS. I have used Gentoo, Ubuntu and Arch in the past 10 years. I ended up with Antergos packaged version of Arch with a bunch of personal tweaks. I tried different distro every now and then but always ended disappointed.

My only needs for distros are to install softwares I use and run them. It turns out to be significantly hard, none of the distros do that without glitches, screen tearing and inconsistency across GUI frameworks. Surely I can tweak them to my liking, but the rabbit hole goes very deep until it comes to a satisfying result.

Pop!_OS is the first OS that stay out of the way, I barely notice the existence of OS, and neither do I want to tweak it, and that is the way I want from a distro. The workspace arranging and switching is a nice touch, making it feel like home for tiling window manager users, coming from i3wm, xmonad or whatsnot.

I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works. Pop!_OS provides by far the closest experience I get.

Forgive me for asking, but what is different about this than Ubuntu 19.04? I looked through the POP!_OS (terrible name btw) promo page [1] and the majority of the things it's talking about are basic Gnome features shipped with Ubuntu?

[1] https://system76.com/pop

That's a good question. Unfortunately I can't do System76 and Ubuntu guys justice here because I really don't know the work has been done in both distros.

From the user perspective, I would say smoother hardware integration (I download the ISO with NVIDIA proprietary drivers, haven't encountered any graphic card comparability problem), consistent theme across gtk and qt based applications , saner defaults and clearer setting structure, good keyboard shortcuts. There are merely less than a dozen shortcuts that are not found in Ubuntu, but very easy to get used to. like win + up/down to switch between workspace.

I know all these can be accomplished by extensions, add-ons and themes. But they do feel different when it is out of the box and carefully curated.

mostly custom icon pack and the inclusion of nvidia drivers by default. Seems to work out of the box with laptops with nvidia cards

https://github.com/pop-os/docs/blob/master/docs/difference-b...

It doesn't really add anything.

It does however, break things.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/503481/why-does-apt...

I would steer clear of it unless it actually provides anything other than a default nvidia setup.

> I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works.

This is why I became a Mac user. After 15 years of Linux I was just done with all the bullshit, but I guess I could look into Pop!_OS.

I have found fedora to be the just works distro as long as you pick the right hardware to start. A dell XPS + fedora has been the most productive setup I have ever had.

Second this, and add 'every thinkpad I've ever owned' to your hardware caveat.

My coworkers are leaning towards dell+fedora since every one at the company who has got one of the newer macbooks has had the keyboard fail repeatedly.

I tend to just use the Dell XPS with Ubuntu preinstalled: hardware-related things really do just work.

For everything else I have Emacs :-)

Yeah, Dell XPS + Fedora works great together. I actually started to use Bluetooth with Dell. It just works.

> This is why I became a Mac user.

Heard this from so many people. We have the latest (2017-2018) MBP at work and every single one has serious keyboard problems. Other than that, I have had crashes and random reboots when on battery, with a black screen error message, sound issues (solved by turning volume down, switching outputs back and forth, or rebooting) wifi problems (solved by switching off bluetooth). And don't get me started on the touch bar. From Mac fans I usually get answers like "you're pressing the touch bar wrong, you need to wait longer"... I'm also missing a decent software management. brew is miles away from apt.

So, for me switching to Mac didn't work out. And the new keyboard is a complete dealbreaker for me. I may still get an older mac with a decent keyboard and put Linux on it.

The touchbar is crap, and being a Danish programmer hitting those {} keys really sucks on a mac keyboard.

Everything else has been miles better than Linux though. I mean, when I left fedora 21 for a Mac I had close to a hundred scripts for modifications to make it tolerable. On my Mac I have 0.

It may or may not apply to your scenario since I don't know what your scripts were for, but in my experience as a long time Fedora user, the distro improved in a big way around the 24-26 era.

It's been roughly 10 years since I programmed on a Macbook (Leopard represent), and I did that on a Swedish keyboard so things might be wildly different, but I really really liked mac keyboards for braces and brackets.

Windows requires thumb acrobatics and Alt gr, whereas Macs used shift and option to modify "increasingly".

If I understand you correctly, over the course of 15 years of upgrades on Linux you ended up with almost a hundred scripts to make your DE on Fedora "tolerable", but then you bought a mac and everything has been perfect from the beginning even in between updates with zero regressions in usability for you personally?

If so, good for you, but that doesn't make a non "one size fits all" approach "bullshit".

I agree, configuration was just part of the “bullshit”.

I had to manually disable the dedicated graphics card in my laptop or it would get ridiculously hot while idle. This is probably not an issue if you buy a laptop with preinstalled Linux.

I do a lot of presentations. Getting Linux to work with various projectors wasn’t great. Maybe that’s better in 2019, but it’s never been an issue with my Mac. The lack of ports have, but buying a converter solves that.

Updates broke my software and I had to spend a lot of time sorting it out. A more stable Linux distro might have been better.

My external displays never really worked without problems.

Having used a MacBook trackpad makes it really hard to use non-MacBook trackpads.

It’s a range of stuff like that.

I’m sure you could get Linux to be better, even for me, but I don’t want to use a single second on making it happen. I did when I was younger, that’s why I turned to Linux in the first place. I’ve spent my time building gentoo, but the older I get the more I want things to work out of the box so I can spend my time on other things.

I'm a recent switcher. I got a Mac mini and installed my own 32GB RAM kit after delivery. I wish it played nicer with my Alienware 34" monitor (i dont know which side is to blame) but I know I don't miss Linux.

>brew is miles away from apt.

brew is also miles away from what it used to be. They have recently changed their philosophy about building from source and software support compiled into their built bottles. Did you know that neither mpv or mplayer bottles ship with libdvdread support?

Building mplayer from source fails due to an error building libavcodec against x264. For some reason, the x264 version is not being correctly picked up in the Homebrew build process so it is trying to use a deprecated x264 API that has been built, which is causing it to fail however building the same software outside of Homebrew (same source tarball that Homebrew downloaded) builds just fine with libdvdread and x264 in ffmpeg support.

I'd report it further but the time last someone asked about it they were basically told to fuck off. Their rules for avoiding burnout state the following which really summarizes their recent change in policy:

> 1. Use Homebrew

>Maintainers of Homebrew should be using it regularly[...]

>3. Prioritise Maintainers Over Users

>It's important to be user-focused but ultimately, as long as you follow #1 above, Homebrew's minimum number of users will be the number of maintainers. However, if Homebrew has no maintainers it will quickly become useless to all users and the project will die. As a result, no user complaint, behaviour or need takes priority over the burnout of maintainers. If users do not like the direction of the project, the easiest way to influence it is to make significant, high-quality code contributions and become a maintainer.

Yet proposing a patch for this gets met with "create your own tap and stop bothering us". I'd love to help you, guys, if you weren't gigantic pricks about it!

> Did you know that neither mpv or mplayer bottles ship with libdvdread support?

Maybe because Apple doesn't ship a computer with a DVD drive and hasn't for ~5 years?

Their formula does not disable libdvdread support, but their build from source process fails to detect it if it is otherwise installed. A build from the vanilla source tarball picks it up just fine. So this is not a "Homebrew decided to disable this option", it seems to be a "Homebrew's build process actively avoids searching for other installed software even when the authors of that underlying software enable support by default".

That's the way it should be, obviously.

This is probably why the 'Year of the Linux Desktop' never arrived. The introduction of Macs probably crippled the Linux desktop market. Without Macs companies like System76 would probably have been more successful as more developers demand a good quality Unix compatible machine.

System76 would have never happened, Dell and HP were already pushing Linux before OSX dropped. In the year 2000:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/dell-linuxs-new-best-friend-50...

I don't doubt it's true, but it seems strange to me that because you have many choices, you go to a platform with no choice.

Just because there are many choices doesn't mean you can't make one and stick with it, I've been on Arch for almost a decade now and there aren't many compelling reasons for me to switch all this time later.

I'd think for many the same is true with Ubuntu LTS.

That may have been true at one time, but not anymore. In the 2007-2012 range, mac laptops were the best. After that, hardware stagnated until around 2015 then took a nose dive with the next design.

Likewise, the days of the legendary OSX (sorry, MacOS) stability are long-gone. The team has been slowly gutted over the years to work on iOS since it makes them more money. The security issues from a couple years ago show a design team ignoring reasonably security standards and not implementing any kind of testing or QA.

I only have one mac system left and that's simply for testing Safari. Modern Linux is much more stable in my experience.

I have been a full-time Linux user since in got a bunch of Mandrake CDs in 2002 I believe (and a part-time user before that), an iOS user since the start, and a macOS user since last year, and I cannot honestly say that I prefer one over the other in toto, really.

I've been using Gentoo Linux as my desktop/work OS for more than 10 years now, and I have no more problems with it than I do with macOS.

My Gentoo/Linux complaint is that I cannot for the life of me get PDFs to print correctly. While my one main complaint with macOS is that macports and homebrew are pretty crappy compared to portage, in my purely subjective experience of course.

Otherwise, I really like using both, each for different things. They each definitely do different things better than the other, but I don't actually know how much of that has to do directly with the operating systems.

Anyway, they are both unix-y enough for me that it's fine for what I want.

It's always interesting to me to read about people having such bad experiences with mac or linux or anything else really, since that has never been my own experience. Even with Windows, which I really dislike, I've almost never had any bad technical experience with it. (Bad user experiences, sure.)

I don't know if I am just lucky or just have lower standards?

> I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works.

Same here. For me the answer was KDE Neon. I have like one or two grievances with KDE Neon currently. One of them being that OBS Studio often stops responding when I try to exit it. But for my use-cases KDE Neon has been the best desktop experience I have had in the 10 years since I switched to exclusively using Linux and FreeBSD. Along the way I have gone through a few different distros.

Nice pick. I think we went down different path in the maze of linux distroes. But I'm glad you find something you find fit. I like KDE base softwares better than gnome based counterparts.

Lucky you because there's an OS that tweaks everything to your liking. The fact that Pop!_OS is not a rolling distro might be a big - for many people.

Fair point. I enjoy rolling release model too. Some times I hope Pop!_OS and Elementary were not based on Ubuntu at the first place.

Rolling distributions simply do not provide the stability for serious production environments.

Is a desktop a production environment?

If you make your money using your desktop, then yes it is.

Time is always money one way or another. Time is ever so precious.

Even if you disagree, if a pentester uses Kali Linux (a Debian-based rolling release distribution), and they get paid for it, yes. Even then, Kali Linux regularly breaks, so a solution is to run it on VMs with snapshots (or communicate to each other when it breaks, or use a microSD card for a working version).

There's also a clear advantage: you get the newest versions of software much quicker than an OS which updates every half year (or a LTS version which gets updated less often).

Personally I can say the same thing for Arch Linux. Since you've used both, could you elaborate what is better in Pop!_OS than Arch?

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