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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was a straightforward way to take the diff of all the Ubuntu variants. Ostensibly one could take Ubuntu and run a few shell scripts (I am grossly oversimplifying) and boom you are now running Pop.

So much time and effort goes into building an _entire_ distribution when, at the core, 90% or more of the thing is identical to Ubuntu LTS. Am I missing something?

Also... the name with the exclamation and the underscores is one of the most user hostile and nonsensical things I have ever seen in open source, since brainfuck the language.

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A heavy criticism of a lot of these ubuntu-based distros is "ubuntu + a custom PPA", but system76 does actually put in a lot of work into a custom kernel and some neat UI tweaks that make the OS on their hardware really well. They also have a firmware updater for their systems built into the settings program. The whole experience is a lot more refined than Ubuntu, I believe. It's a great OS for their machines, as well as any laptop with hybrid Intel/Nvidia graphics.

I have been a heavy Ubuntu user for awhile now and currently I have a Dell Precision 55 with Ubuntu 18.04 (came with it) for work and a Lenovo X1 Extreme with PopOS (18.04) that I installed on my personal machine. I think I would install PopOS over vanilla Ubuntu in the future...and I have not had a similar feeling for various alternate distributions like Mint, KDE, or even distros outside of Debian/Ubuntu (e.g. Manjaro). PopOS is the first distribution that I feel like adds a layer of polish and user-friendliness that I find worth it.

I have high hopes for future Ubuntu (desktop) release which seem to be making moves in the right general direction, but at the moment PopOS is probably where I am going to hang my hat.

I run PopOS 18.04 on a Lenovo P1 (sister machine to the X1 Extreme). It works flawlessly and is quite beautiful. I've had issues with Thunderbolt docks, but then again, I had the same with a MacBook Pro 2018.

How does PopOS handle regular bug fixes? Do they rely on the Ubuntu repository or do they apply the same patches and build again?

I searched but couldn't find any info - why do they need a custom kernel? What changes do they make and why don't they upstream them?

They do indeed upstream patches. Here's an example: https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/10/8/851

> I wish there was a straightforward way to take the diff of all the Ubuntu variants.

It's not _exactly_ a diff, but here's a link to the Pop!_OS github page, which contains 149 repos (only 16 of which are forks) https://github.com/pop-os

> one could take Ubuntu and run a few shell scripts (I am grossly oversimplifying) and boom you are now running Pop.

That same link notes that the top languages for the Pop!_OS repos are Rust, C, Python, JavaScript, and (lastly) Shell. So not _exactly_ "a few shell scripts". (I don't know how accurate that really is, but I do know they've written a fair bit of Rust.)

(Note: I don't currently use Pop!_OS and think the name is absurd)

I think they meant you could theoretically "run a few shell scripts" to install and uninstall packages and configuration to change stock Ubuntu to Pop (or Elementary or whatever) since the core OS is the same.

The very first concepts of Pop were like this, but since then the OS has grown to be much more complicated than that. There are some fundamental system configuration changes that make that a very difficult (if not impossible) task right now. It would be like converting a Debian system into Ubuntu.

> I wish there was a straightforward way to take the diff

I suppose booting the live image and dumping packages to a file, then diffing that might be one approach?

(dpkg --get-selections)

You might also want to archive all of /etc, and compare - but that might introduce too much noise.

Would you expect the list of packages on the live image to be the same as a new install (sans drivers)?

Yes, mostly. Or put another way - the live system should be functional and show off the best parts of the "spin" so core packages should be similar.

Distrowatch + Youtube walkthroughs can help some in differentiating, but so far firing up a VM is the only good to way to get a real feel for the flavor.

> So much time and effort goes into building an _entire_ distribution when, at the core, 90% or more of the thing is identical to Ubuntu LTS. Am I missing something?

I think there's a lot of effort that goes into polishing the DE/WM for a specific flavor of Ubuntu. I say this as someone who installed i3 on Linux Mate, and when using Mate now, I see i3 notifications manager.

Sorry, I should have clarified filesystem diff. I am thinking in real low level terms like what truly is the difference between these distributions.

ElementaryOS for example is a perfect case study.

> I say this as someone who installed i3 on Linux Mate, and when using Mate now, I see i3 notifications manager.

This is case and point why desktop linux sucks so bad. And it really bolsters my question: why are so many people reinventing the wheel for so many different things? Why do distributions need to have their own of everything? And if you do, hey that is great but why do you then need to wrap it into a different OS that is really just a popular one with a lot of tweaks?

I am coming from the perspective of someone who hates 'state' period ... or specifically determinism. So if I cannot reliably go from A to B to C (distributions) by just adding/removing packages and/or a kernel or two ... then the entire thing puts a bad taste in my mouth and makes me feel like the OS I am running is actually just a bunch of duct tape and garbage.

The irony is that under the hood linux is literally just plain old files on a disk. Yet if an XFCE Manjaro user asks somewhere publicly to switch to Gnome ... the solution ultimately tends to be "reinstall the Gnome ISO and copy your shit over"

> clarified filesystem diff. I am thinking in real low level terms like what truly is the difference between these distributions

One way to do that would be to install each version of each variant you are interested in on a VM (of exactly the same config each time), script a filesystem scan that always outputs the same order and sends the result to a central area where you can do a simple text diff on the output or load the results into a db of some sort for deeper analysis. You could even automate it to an extent.

I'm not entirely sure what you'd learn of much use, and you won't learn the differences between matters of real hardware support, but it might be an interesting exercise anyway.

This would only really be useful for comparing similar distributions, i.e. Ubuntu variations of similar vintage. There is so much different between, say, Ubuntu and CentOS, or Ubuntu now and Ubuntu last year, that there are too many differences for a filesystem level compare like that to be meaningful at all.

check out bedrock linux

The awkward name is an immediate turnoff IMO.

Just take a look at all the variations in this HN thread on the spelling of it. "Pop", "PopOS", "Pop OS"... I only counted two that used the full name "Pop!_OS".

There you go. "Windows" has been the most consistent in its original naming and is instantly recognisable on its own without the versioning names (XP,Vista,7,8,10). Ubuntu is also the same.

macOS was nearly confusing (was first Mac OS X, OS X and now macOS) but is still recognisable in the software ecosystem with its exact full name still used.

The name "Pop!_OS" on the other hand looks so cryptic that its users have simplified the name to just “Pop OS”. It’s likely that someone will create a distro for the sake of renaming it. I won't be surprised to see a renaming soon.

Agreed, and it's a crying shame, because over the past 23 years of trying and using Linux distros for work and play, I find Pop!_OS to be the best of the lot by a wide margin. I don't imagine I'll use another desktop distro on any of my systems unless System76 somehow screws up all the fantastic work they've done on it.

FWIW I work on Pop OS for System76 and using the "proper" name doesn't really matter to us. I don't even use it myself, except when I'm writing technical, first-party information/documentation that needs to be part of our cohesive brand. In colloquial use, just call it Pop.

Thank you, I too find the name choice a bit thoughtless. I get it you wanted to be different. But that is a really hard to google for name. I would of preferred Sys76OS

Seems OK. Google, Bing, and DDG all show the sys76 pop OS site when I search for just pop os.

Searching for "how to burn a CD pop os" has less useful results than "how to burn a CD ubuntu", but I think that's a user base size issue, not a naming issue.

That would imply that it was a horrible old IBM thing. Though, to be honest, so does their company name.

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