Pop_OS 21.10 has landed | Hacker News Reader

Pop_OS 21.10 has landed

blog.system76.com

40 pointsdmytton27 comments

I stopped using Pop_OS because it breaks compatibility with nvidia-docker, which I use for tensorflow, and the devs say this doesn’t matter because they made their own project for running tensorflow in docker. Their project is called “tensorman” and it’s a complete joke.

I've been running this on my ThinkPad P1 for a couple of years now without fail. I like that I have the ability to be able to easily switch between discrete and integrated graphics and download and update ThinkPad firmware. I assume Ubuntu has these features now, but I'm not really sure as I haven't touched it in a long time.

Initially I had issues specific to my P1 regarding external monitors and switching between graphics modes, but I likely would've experienced these issues with whatever distro I used, and they've since been addressed.

The only thing that irritates me now is that the Pop Shop app occasionally blocks apt because it's running update in the background. And the app can become laggy if you're doing too much with it at once.

Overall PopOS just does what is says on the box and with minimal need to configure it. It's currently my preferred distro for modern laptops.

I have a system76 laptop and love using Pop_OS. Granted, I spend most of my day in the terminal, but the driver support for bluetooth and wifi are really good and work out of the box. Think Ubuntu, but less bloated.

Disappointed the arm release is raspberry pi specific and not a standard uefi aarch64 iso installer. Upstream Ubuntu releases these and they work great for esxi arm edition.

Would be nice if the blog post included screenshots big enough to actually see what it looks like.

>Would be nice if the blog post included screenshots big enough to actually see what it looks like.

There's pictures and video: https://pop.system76.com/

Well sure, pictures and video on another page.

I assume the point of that blog post is to generate interest in the OS, so being able to discern details in the screenshots seems like a reasonable expectation in that context.

> We now disable user-added PPAs, as they often cause upgrade issues for users.

Doesn't that eliminate a lot of software options? Just curious, I haven't used Linux or Ubuntu in a while so things could have changed or I might be misunderstanding something

It's long been recommended by both Pop and upstream Ubuntu (iirc) to disable PPA's during upgrades, and purge them if possible, before doing a dist-upgrade.

Pop now just does the disabling for you, and you would re-enable the correct PPA afterwords.

Is there a simple way to just reenable all the ppas at once?

I'm afraid I don't know off the top of my head. I don't usually use PPA's, most things I want are in the repos, I compile myself, or a direct download.

I would there is, but I don't know how.

What is exactly the benefit of Pop_OS compared to Ubuntu? I mean installed drivers are great, but that was basically only one apt install command and a reboot.

A lot of people like the Pop OS desktop, COSMIC; I myself haven't used it or regular GNOME enough to say which one I prefer. (System76 said they're making a new version in Rust that isn't based on GNOME, but that's probably a long way from completion.)

I don’t daily drive pop os but i theirs a couple quality of life improvements like slimmed down default applications, improved App Store, default support for battery profiles. Also I don’t believe they install any Snaps and instead use flatpacks when necessary. People like the theme too.

It's been a while since I used Pop_OS but it played better with setting up Nvidia proprietary drivers from the get go and that helped with getting a quick local ML dev environment set up. Their new tiling window manager also looks neat (seems close to i3wm and I'm looking forward to trying it) and even though you can change colorschemes pretty easily, I like their default colorscheme.

Ubuntu without snapd

And Nvidia drivers already set up, which you can spend a lot of time fiddling with in other distros.

and they are setup in a way which breaks compatibility with nvidia-docker, so beware of that.

Use tensorman. It's way cleaner than nvidia-docker, and isn't made by a company hostile to Linux to boot.

Yep. I also really like their extensions to GNOME.

Drivers, customizations on top of Gnome (if you prefer them), App Store, flatpak instead of snap. Plus made by an indie company rather than some massive corp if you're into that sort of thing.

Hmm, Canonical is not what I call 'massive' at ~600 employees[1]. Looks like Red Hat is almost twice that big[2], which still strikes me as pretty small?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company)#Employees

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat

I think you misread the page, as it says that Red Hat has 13,400 employees, which is 22x more than 600, not "almost twice" :)

But also, both numbers are also outdated. The Canonical employee count is apparently around 500 in 2020 [0] and the Red Hat employee count is no longer public post-acquisition, but it's higher than it was in 2019.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Canonica...

Oops, you're right, that's just the Czech subsidiary - so they are massive-ish, at least compared to Canonical!

True, I was being a bit hyperbolic with "massive corp" :). Employee size isn't everything in determining how "big" an organization is, though. I really just meant that it, personally, makes me feel better to use something created by a small, scrappy team than something maintained by a multinational enterprise.

I started to use it a few years ago when it was the only distro runs flawlessly on my laptop. All other distros had various problems at the time. I think that's its killer feature, hassle free.

It's the only distro I would recommend to non tech people if they want to try out linux.

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