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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

1. Why not link the original article[1] with the benchmarks and use your favorite way to translate?

2. Curious why they didn't use OG Ubuntu in the benchmarks. Yes Popos(I still don't agree on that name) is just another Ubuntu, but I would have proffered the OG snice that's the most popular worldwide and I don't know what Popos does to make it more "gaming focused" than vanilla Ubuntu.

For another popular Ubuntu alternative they could have also went with Linux Mint. AFAIK both are still default on X11 while latest Ubuntu defaults to Wayland so that could have made a difference.

[1] https://www.computerbase.de/2023-12/welche-linux-distributio...

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I think the thing that makes popOS relevant to gaming is how system76 offers a variant with proprietary Nvidia drivers baked in and properly configured to not break with updates.

That's a good point.

That's precisely what Ubuntu (and Debian) offer with the nvidia driver from their repos, isn't it?

You have to install that after installing Ubuntu, which isn’t necessarily clear and might be confusing for someone coming from Windows where there is only one Nvidia driver, with the version shipped with Windows being adequate for most users.

If you are gaming on Windows, you are most likely installing GeForce now and updating the Nvidia driver separately from the Windows updater so the install separate driver is probably not foreign or confusing to users.

Also on Mint, the OS installs with the open source driver but upon first boot it shows a notification to allow you to download and enable the closed source driver so it is very upfront and not something that you need to hunt for.

People building their own systems are definitely going to be installing from GeForce Experience, but there’s quite a number of prebuilt users who probably aren’t.

Mint’s approach is definitely better than Ubuntu’s, but pop’s has the advantage of making it clear from the point of download that Nvidia users are covered.

Do you guys both mean Geforce Experience? Geforce Now is Nvidias cloud gaming service.

Yes, great catch. Fixed.

Yes I did...it's been a while since I installed it so I misremembered the name XD

> I don't know what Popos does to make it more "gaming focused" than vanilla Ubuntu.

They have a few changes, chief among them being the PopOS scheduler which I find to be quite effective: https://github.com/pop-os/system76-scheduler

The desktop itself is a weird custom-baked x11/GNOME customization you won't really get on Ubuntu. Not many distributions can claim the title of being truly "unique", but PopOS does deserve the title in my opinion. Even still it wouldn't be my choice for gaming, but I'll defend it's identity as something more than another GNOME/Debian spin.

> Not many distributions can claim the title of being truly "unique"

Sir, I think you've just insulted like dozens of distros out there.

IMHO there are a lot of more "truly unique" distros out there than just spins of Ubuntu with a different DE and scheduler: Nobara(from the benchmark), Q4OS, Antix, Mabox, Linux Lite, Gecko Linux, Spiral Linux, in no particular order, not that they're better than Popos, but they're definitely more unique.

Probably so. Relative to PopOS, not many of them are quite as pre-customized (not that it's an inherently good or bad thing).

Depends. Personally I don't consider Popos's DE to be a feature but more of a bug. I think the two competing giants, KDE and Gnome, are more solid and see more dev time and effort put into them, and will do just fine to satisfy all users, preferences and use cases, I don't see the need for the Nth+1 DE that fixes problems Gnome & KDE don't have. But that's just my opinion.

From using PopOS, mostly for other reasons like out of the box drive encryption and nvidia support, the DE's purpose as far as I can tell is mostly to provide a reasonably user-friendly tiling window manager without replacing all of Gnome. Though now they are also replacing all of gnome in the next major release, so who knows.

@FirmwareBurner Just to answer the first question. I thought this was actually a good summary in English plus it has the link to the original article.

apropos popos, if you want Ubuntu but with Flatpak instead of Snap it's a good fast way to get it

> Yes Popos(I still don't agree on that name)

Do you happen to be German? ;-) To be fair, it's actually spelled PopOS, making it more clear that it's not about baby butts.

There are definitely worse offenders. Looking at you, Wix and MongoDB!

Mint has degraded in the last 10 years and likely shouldn't be easily recommended anymore. After the buzz came the maintaining issues.

I am not a fan of Ubuntu on desktops either and have no idea what PopOS is.

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