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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

> Since it's based on Ubuntu 20.04.3

...ok, can someone explain why anyone should bother with this when Ubuntu 20.04.3 already exists? What does it do so much differently that makes it "fun, productive, and rock solid"? As far as I can tell from this marketing copy, it's just Ubuntu with specific set of preinstalled packages and maybe a special theme.

Honestly, there are so many of these "OS"s that I kinda want to just create thisosdoesnotexist.com that randomly selects packages to bundle in an Ubuntnu installer image and generates a name, logo, and marketing copy that calls it some combination of things like "beautiful", "blazing fast", and "powerful".

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As someone new to Linux, I'm curious about this as well.

As a comparison, take Android. Thinking broadly about fragmentation, Android is fragmented because of so many different hardware vendors who use Android on their phones. They make hardware and have an incentive to customize Android to work on their phone because it's free and helps them sell phones. But the vendors don't try to call it anything but Android usually (not sure).

But this isn't the case for Linux. Basically zero vendors are Linux first, only a small number like System76 or Purism. So where's the incentive to create all these distros?

I can only conclude that the incentive to create more distros is created by builders. It's not companies (as in Android's case), and it's not users as users have better things to do. It's a bit odd to me.

PopOS by System76 perhaps is similar to Android then. System76 wants to differentiate. I have read their guide to how it's different than stock Ubuntu [1] But why not call it "Ubuntu - customized for System76" version or something. But look, I'm a huge fan of System76 so if they say it's needed, I trust them. And sure, the tweaks they've added seem fine (disk encryption on install, power profiler)...but making it distinct from Ubuntu to me is a negative. I trust Ubuntu, why sell me something else? I added mouse drivers and custom keyboard commands to PopOS - is it now iStingray OS?

Disclosure: I'm new to Linux, switched 2 weeks ago due to Apple's surveillance. Am on a System76 laptop running PopOS. I support System76 and donated to PopOS directly.

[1] https://support.system76.com/articles/difference-between-pop...

Ubuntu is a trademark, they can fork it as they did, but if they want to use their name, they need permission and Ubuntu has a strict policy on that

Ah got it, so that makes sense. I bet the licensing around Android also explains some of the fragmentation etc. IMO it would serve System76's brand to have a tight Ubuntu partnership/license, at least for me as a customer. Maybe that's in their roadmap.

> I bet the licensing around Android also explains some of the fragmentation

I don't think that's the problem. AOSP is free-software but Google tries to enforce strict guidelines for "Android" labeling. It has some good sides (Treble architecture for maintainable devices) but mostly bad sides (forcing to package the Google Play Services universal spyware). Still, whether approved by Google or not, you find plenty of both high-quality and low-quality Android distros (with and without source code), but Google's approved Androids certainly have much less fragmentation in terms of features/settings than competing (or homebrew) Android.

> it would serve System76's brand to have a tight Ubuntu partnership/license

How would that benefit users? Canonical (Ubuntu's editor) is basically the Windows of GNU/Linux world, forcing telemetry and enabling privacy-invasive ads into your desktop. Actually-benevolent entities like System76 could only benefit from dropping Ubuntu entirely and contributing directly to upstream Debian (the basis of Ubuntu) which is maintained by a non-profit foundation to which many different entities (including other big companies) contribute.

Thanks for helping me understand Linux. Working to understand better how it works. I like your idea of Debian, based on what you said.

I somewhat agree, except when it comes to Pop!OS (which is what I use). Their tiling wm and shell are a huge improvement over regular gnome and their package distribution (including nvidia drivers and other stuff) makes it more solid than Ubuntu for me. I could live with Ubuntu though.

Pop!_OS makes some kind of sense because it is paired with System76's purpose-built hardware so they want to be able to tweak everything so that it works properly on that specific hardware. Still seems unnecessary but at least I can understand that.

Not everybody wants to setup Ubuntu to be the way ZorinOS comes out of the box?

Surely this concept is not so foreign to you in 2021, after questions like yours have been rehashed on HN thousands of times.

The fundamental question of what distinguishes an OS is relevant to the thread, and worthy of ongoing discussion.

Having used ZorinOS (and Ubuntu, and Mint, and several other "based on Ubuntu"s), it has a nicer installer, and a nicer package manager (it can find and install snaps and flatpaks based on a text search, which makes finding mainstream apps easier). Also it's GNOME install is configured to be a bit more Windows-like.

Overall, it feels like an incremental but noticeable improvement.

Zorin is like ChromeOS w/o Google.

It's pretty, comes with the stuff you* want, "just works"

It's UI is actually quite nice for older users who you don't want on ChromeOS.

*You is the "average" normie user, not you (or me) specifically.

> You is the "average" normie user, not you (or me) specifically.

Ok, I disagree with this characterization of users, but whatever.

Why is it better than stock Ubuntu? What in the hell makes it so special that adding another distro to the 300 already out there seemed like a good idea?

I answered why you should "bother". But I don't know the answer for the new question of why it's "better".

All you said was:

> It's pretty, comes with the stuff you* want, "just works"

Which describes about 200 of the 300+ distros out there by their own marketing copy.

Ubuntu is based on Debian, another Linux distro, and was still a huge step forward. Building on the current best in class to create something better sounds like a sensible idea.

In what ways? That's all I'm asking. If you build something you think is so different from what it is based on that it deserves to have its own name+OS, then why can't you be bothered to say what it is that makes it different? Instead we get useless words like "fun", "beautiful", and "easy to use".

The point is that those words have actual meaning to actual users. You think its "useless" but like, that's just your opinion man.

Do they? What does "fun" mean here? "Beautiful"? "Easy to use"?

These are all subjective terms at best. I can call Motif beautiful and no one can say I'm wrong.

Because Motif is objectively beautiful :)

Beautiful is never objective, it is “in the eye of the beholder.”

Friend, I'm aware. I was attempting humor.

Subjectivity is the point of those words. People need only agree that they are true, rather than agree upon why it is true, since it is meant to make people feel good about their decision. As for those who disagree, they don't really matter since they are not the target audience.

Debian has a rule that precludes the distribution of non free software by default. They also select older versions of software than you might like due to their release cycle.

That includes stuff like firmware for peripherals. So distributions further down the chain tend to include that stuff, so if you prefer to be on the cutting edge and aren't a purist about your distribution, you pick something else.

> They also select older versions of software than you might like due to their release cycle

Not necessarily true anymore. They have roughly the same versions as Ubuntu, sometimes newer if you compare Ubuntu 18.04 with Debian 10 and considerably newer packages than OpenSuSe Leap 15.3 which carries some of the same versions as 15.0.

Did you read this article? Or visit ZorinOS’ website?

Or do you somehow believe that only a 5 word motto should explain everything to you?

I did both and sure it’s just a oneliner in essence. Zorin kubuntu, zorin preinstalled apps, zorin jelly mode windows for zorin productivity. So much fun and much faster compared these regular unnamed unzorin meh-OS as you may have seen on a TV. That’s basically it.

I very much agree with you, and I think an important reason to do so is that there isn't necessarily an objective "better". Debian's conservative release is great for production servers and stability. Ubuntu and many of these "OS" vendors' choices are great if you want exactly what you get and don't care too much about the things under the hood.

I love both Arch and Debian, but I usually use them for very different things.

Back in the day Ubuntu was sufficiently different from Debian due to Unity. You couldn't get unity any other way, and unity was one of the better DEs. These days, since everyone defaults to Gnome, there isn't a ton of difference between Debian and its derivates, and even Debian and Fedora derivatives. They are all about the same. The only different ones are the ones that are remarkably different, like NixOS or Fedora Silverblue.

Just came by to say that I still use Unity.

Yeah, I do too on one of my laptops, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to use it. X is not going to get better, and some things like screen tearing, especially with rotated screens, are only fixed in wayland.

I don’t know about that… Recently I installed Ubuntu on a laptop, said “meh” and then replaced it with the stock Debian stable which has been working flawlessly. (Also, I feel like I trust Debian more than Ubuntu, although I’d have hard time explaining exactly why.)

Trusting two people with my secrets necessarily seems riskier than having to trust only one person with my secrets. Maybe the feeling is similar?

Because Canonical has forced telemetry and ads on their users, betraying everyone's trust? They built their business empire on distributing free CDs and financing local communities (on the condition that they ONLY promote/support Ubuntu)... All the hard, user-facing trust-building work was done by volunteers who've been definitely betrayed by this greedy corporation. We could also talk about questionable technical decisions:

- X11 model is broken, people are working on Wayland to replace it, let's write an entirely solution (Mir)

- GNOME2 is working too well and people are too happy with it, let's produce a desktop environment full of bugs at least for the next 4 years (Unity) instead of fixing bugs and performance issues in GNOME3

- Package managing is just a little too much reliable, what if we forced `apt` to install random snapcraft packages instead of the intended deb packages?

To get a bit of historical perspective, Ubuntu copied what worked really well with Mandrake/Mandriva: a user-friendly user interface. But they copied it to extinguish all alternatives, which mostly worked. Nowadays, Ubuntu is only good if you can get commercial support ($$$$) to fix everything they break.

Better than the best. I need more english classes to bring myself up to date.

I think Linux users believe they have choice when in actuality its the same shit just repackaged in a different way again and again. Sure there are innovations that happen between distros, with some having novel philosophies, but its not as often as users would like to think

The main differences between distros are the desktop environments and the package managers.

I'd say those are meaningful choices.

They are targeting users that don't want to install their packages or learn how to set up a new wm or theme. That's simply it. As much as distros and the Linux ecosystem prides itself on its customizability, there will always be people (myself included) that simply want an easy way to run something with preinstalled defaults that matches my aesthetic and functional requirements. Yes, I could install Ubuntu, and then go ahead and install some other packages and a theme. This saves me several steps and they'll presumably keep it updated and compatible with each other nicely in a way that I couldn't care to as an end user with my modified Ubuntu.

The ultimate explanation is that none of these distros are necessarily competing with one another. I use Ubuntu on my media server, Arch on my desktop, Debian in my cloud instances, BSD on my router and I play with NixOS on my dev machine. You could argue that it doesn't matter since they're all POSIX-based, but typically someone doesn't go through the trouble of releasing their own disk image unless they're doing something novel.

> but typically someone doesn't go through the trouble of releasing their own disk image unless they're doing something novel.

That's what I'm saying though, what is novel about this? So novel that it made sense to make a new distribution for it?

The word 'Distros' is in itself called roughly a packaging. What differs is the following: Display Environment Kernel Preinstalled packages Package manager Display Server Build tools Resource requirement Philosophy + some addition tweaks by various distros to improve experience.

Ok, I'll bite.

I actually use it on my laptop I'm typing on. I installed it because it was basically ubuntu and I didn't feel like configuring themes at that time, and I didn't really care.

However, I have long decided I should just install Ubuntu since there is no point at having another actor I need to trust in the chain, even though I need to install so many things from source anyways just because ubuntu repositories are not always bleeding edge enough for me. Problem is, I was so causal on my install that I did not notice the default Ubuntu install does not separate out /home partition, so I need to copy all my date to an external disk to upgrade ... You get the picture.

There is nothing here other than something somebody who either did not care enough or did not know enough would be decide to use and add the risk of another upstream source they aren't vetting, and actually they lock some things out and you need to use alternate repositories to install them. Most repositories are just Ubuntu repositories otherwise. They do not use their own other than for a few things. But they sell a pro version, so their own motivation is simple - to be a small business.

Probably because of Ubuntu branding using annoying colors like magenta and orange?

Please do that. It would be incredible.

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