Hacker News Reader

Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Come back to where the air is crisp - Debian 12 is glorious.

I've used Debian since the early 2000s and keep wondering why there are any other distributions of Linux.

Debian fell out of favor because stable is too damned stale and ubuntu had a lot of small polish and quality of life improvements that debian didn't have at the time.

I used ubuntu for years, but finally gave up on it when they started pushing snaps hard. I'm on PopOS now now but I'll go to mint debian edition or something else if I have to.

Right, stable being a couple years out of date near the end of the lifecycle is somewhat annoying. I feel like the Docker world probably made people care less about this; it's rarely the Linux kernel that prevents your application from running (but Node/Python runtimes are a huge problem). But for desktop stuff people read a blog post about some new feature and want it today, which is a problem when the priority is stability. So I can see that being annoying for the average end user that's not looking for a server OS.

I compromise and install most of the software I use on a daily basis from Homebrew. So I have some crufty version of `ls`, but the latest version of Emacs.

It being out of date was annoying for server too.

Or come to Ubuntu without the nonsense: Linux Mint.

or popOS

Is Pop!OS a viable alternative to Ubuntu? I don't like Snaps but I like the fact that all my hardware (even my nVidia GPU) is supported. I think rolling release would be better, though, even if stuff breaks once in a while.

Pop OS with Nvidia drivers ISO:

https://iso.pop-os.org/22.04/amd64/nvidia/31/pop-os_22.04_am...

Works great on my machine with a RTX 2060.

Hmm, why is it an ISO, rather than getting the drivers from a server afterwards? I have a few devices that need proprietary drivers, do I need to do the same for the others?

The download page states:

"If you have NVIDIA graphics, download the ISO with the proprietary NVIDIA driver preinstalled."

There is also a non-Nvidia ISO:

https://iso.pop-os.org/22.04/amd64/intel/31/pop-os_22.04_amd...

As well as Raspberry Pi:

https://iso.pop-os.org/22.04/arm64/raspi/4/pop-os_22.04_arm6...

Yeah, popOS is basically ubuntu without snaps, with the latest nvidia drivers, and a scheduler that gives better gaming performance (gaming on linux has really come a long way since the steam deck has been released).

Before this, I used arch, until a simple update rendered my system unbootable. When I asked an arch dev why they were shipping a master branch grub build, I was told that if I couldn't easily recover a corrupted grub install I should consider another distro. I installed pop the next day. I've been very happy with it from that point forward. If I had to use something else it'd probably be mint.

I can't get over the ridiculous name. The way you wrote it is how it should be named.

Debian remains OK (I use it on all of my machines), but worrying signs have been growing there as well.

> worrying signs have been growing there as well

Care to elaborate?

My comment was too harsh to Debian. Debian has been good to me, and is the best distro I've used.

But their adoption of systemd is something that makes me worried for the future. It's still avoidable for now, but the writing is on the wall.

systemd is great

Meh. SystemD makes me nervous. One system that does so much and can rewrite my BIOS. I may have to just go back to VMS.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com