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5 Years of Pop _OS

blog.system76.com

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Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#101

Post by airtonix »

pmontra wrote: post #40
qbasic_forever wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep I've had the exact same experience. I love that pop is setup out of the box to work well with flatpaks and flathub too--I rarely have to mess with out of date debs, the pain of snaps, etc. The gnome extensions they pack in for tiling windows, adding desktop icons, are fantastic too. It just works.

No snaps is good but 1. Slack is a snap. Do you have to run it in the browser? I don't know if desktop sharing works well there, it's been years since I only used their app (Electron?) 2. Is flatpack optional or are there some mandatory flatpack apps that are part of the system? I'd like a deb only system. 3. Contrary to some of us I don't want to use a tiling window manager. Can I keep using my heavily customized Gn…

No post body was provided.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#102

Post by jrootabega »

bugfix-66 wrote: post #2

I've owned three System76 desktops. Highly recommended if you want a Linux desktop computer.

I would have bought one long ago if they hadn't included binding arbitration in their terms of sale. It looks like they still do.

https://system76.com/terms

(In that spirit, I need to look into moving off Ubuntu in response to self-promotion being added to system commands.)

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#103

Post by rgoulter »

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #95
colordrops wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you garbage-collect older working generations without testing whether the latest works. You'd have to go out of your way to do that, and it goes against the entire purpose of it.

Not every bug manifests itself right after reboot. You can easily have a bunch of generations you just think are ok. The point is entirely different: if you update the channel-list you need the network for any changes to the configuration and I don't know of a way to go back to an earlier channel state.

> The point is entirely different: if you update the channel-list you need the network for any changes to the configuration and I don't know of a way to go back to an earlier channel state.

`nix-channel` does have a `--rollback` flag to it.

However, I feel that Nix Flakes would allow you a better experience. With nix flakes, the revision of the nixpkgs input is persisted in a lockfile. You could check this file in somewhere, and then getting your working directory back to a known working state is much easier.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#104

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

colordrops wrote: post #100
ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every bug manifests itself right after reboot. You can easily have a bunch of generations you just think are ok. The point is entirely different: if you update the channel-list you need the network for any changes to the configuration and I don't know of a way to go back to an earlier channel state.

Once again, why wouldn't you keep the last few generations around? No network is required to use them.

Answering your question: ENOSPC

This is not a support forum and we're not trying to diagnose and fix someone's issue. It's just not that hard to get into trouble with NixOS and there's still a room for improvement, that's all.

Reading on `nix-channel --rollback`, it should definitely help in some cases and I don't know how I missed it, maybe the docs weren't clear it's not tied to config generations or I just didn't pay enough attention.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#105

Post by rgoulter »

colordrops wrote: post #98
rgoulter wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's worth adding that NixOS probably will require more effort to use than the "it just works" UX that GP seems to be wanting. Getting familiar with nix can take some time. e.g. figuring out how to write a Nix package if there's not a package already can be difficult. When things work in NixOS, it really does feel very nice to know you have a declared config (so that you don't have to worry about what changes…

You could say the same about Linux in general. It does takes some time to really get comfortable with the complex surface area of the system, but once you do, the benefits are tremendous and without doubt. Same goes for programming languages, driving a car, learning guitar, etc. I don't think people really understand the fundamental shift of moving to declarative config. It's absolutely worth the cost of admission an…

Ah, sure. I think it's worth the cost; but I also think it's not a cost everyone wants to pay.

In a way, I think most of the "I tried Nix/NixOS but didn't stick with it" comments are about its learning curve.

I'd make comparisons to other tools: VSCode does the job pretty well without having to learn anything, but many people will learn tools like vim, & emacs. (The latter isn't just out of legacy; kakoune & helix seem pretty neat).

Still, I'd gate these power-user tools behind "you need to take the time to learn them", rather than a general recommendation.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#106

Post by int_19h »

pjmlp wrote: post #96
tlamponi wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, and most people I worked with, couldn't care less if the border/title bar looks slightly odd, the same happens on Windows a lot. The issue ain't different WMs or toolkits, but a lock-in effort from Microsoft with HW and SW vendors, they still had to create WSL to actually improve their dev experience though, could not manage that without. Most people ain't technical experienced or interested in IT and just don't c…

I am yet to bother with WSL, it hardly brings something I wasn't already having with VMWare and VirtualBox, and in any case "developer != UNIX". The cleverness of WSL is that Microsoft came to realise, thanks to Apple, thank many folks only care about having a POSIX userland and don't really care about Linux as such. Given that current generations mix up Linux with UNIX, it made more business sense to add Linux compa…

It had to be not just any POSIX userland, but the kind that could run all the popular web dev tooling, starting with Node.js. MacOS can get away with not being like Linux in many ways because of how widespread it is, but a new contender pretty much has to be compatible. And Linux is especially convenient to emulate due to its public and stable syscall interface.

All that said, the kernel emulation layer that WSL1 was built on was originally intended to run Android apps.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#107

Post by dm319 »

thisiswrongggg wrote: post #80
nu11ptr wrote: post #6

I really like Pop Os. I've always liked Debian descended distros, and prior to this I was using Ubuntu. While I like it, I always found a lot of rough edges esp. when it came to proprietary drivers, etc. where things didn't always work without some tweaking. Pop Os on the other hand seems to "just work" - it is like a polished version of Ubuntu with a nice selection of apps in the Pop Shop. Theme is pretty nice as we…

I'm curious. With all these debian-based distros, why people don't just use debian? I mean it has to be sturdier than the downstream distros.

Debian is a pain! I just tried installing it on a laptop. During installation it points out it can't find a wifi driver and do I have it to hand? I didn't and I don't know where to find it. It says I can use ethernet, but the ethernet wasn't close to me at the time and laptop's battery was shot so I couldn't move. I proceed without internet. I google how to install non-free firmware after the fact, and find that there is an app in the repository. Once the install is done, I shut it down and move it to a room with ethernet. We boot up, plug it in and get internet! But for some reason I am not attached to any software repositories apart from those on an install CD/DVD. I don't know what has happened, but I assume that my lack of internet during install meant I don't have apt sources properly configured. I considered googling how to add these, but instead, I said goodbye to the early 2000s gnome 2 theme, shut it down and tried another debian-derived distro that has all the advantages of debian, a beautiful modern theme, and I don't spend hours googling things I don't know.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#108

Post by pSYoniK »

I've been meaning to fully switch to Linux on my desktop and laptop for some time, but I'm not the only person using them, so I had to account for that. After using Zorin OS for about 6-7 months (and paying for their pro version) I was having some difficulties with running games and drivers on it. I then tried out Pop Os on my desktop first and haven't had any issues. Once I spent time tweaking the remaining settings that I liked in Zorin OS (win key + number to access dash apps) and a few other tweaks, I fully switched to Pop Os on the desktop and the laptop.

It's been a few months and I must say that it's what I've been looking for in a Linux distro. Something predictable, stable, that has good out of the box defaults and runs great for some games as well. For anyone looking to switch from Windows, I can't recommend it enough. Anyone else using the desktop/laptop also feel right at home starting up a few programs, editing a document or a picture and watching videos and pictures (that's really what most average users do anyway). It's also really great to be able to switch between tiling and non-tiling modes with one keyboard shortcut, which gives me a lot of the things I loved in i3wm/regolith while keeping it usable for average Joe (I'll never forget the confusion on the face of a friend opening up a picture and trying to resize the window as it was taking up half the screen next to Firefox).

Great job to the Pop Os team!

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#109

Post by tehbeard »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #81
tehbeard wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The confusion is there's no info on what's different between them presented to the user. I know vaguely that flatpak is "like docker" in terms of wrapping dependencies. I have no clue how that translates to missing features of compatibility issues with other apps. Even knowing which is more up to date isn't shown. Or why i should pick one over the other. The multiple packaging types confounded my efforts to debug an…

Does it matter? People that care know and people that don't know don't need to care.

Yes it does? If it doesn't matter, why are there two or even 3 options at times for the same software with little detail as to why?

And if the packaging difference does matter (as it did for my vlc issue, one solution only worked for the deb), then an explanation for newbies should be given as to the general expectations for each package type.

Or should I just "git gud" and go digging through ppa/flathub? mailing lists to find a 2013 reply to a post?

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#110

Post by int_19h »

blondin wrote: post #52

i am not happy with my galago pro. system76 is a name that often comes up when you ask about linux laptops. so i decided to try their galago pro. and i have to be honest here. as a long time macbook user, this is definitely a downgrade for the price. especially when you can get an M1 and a better experience for the same price. the trackpad is weird and does not work well. i apply too much pressure for my clicks to re…

Star Labs is another option if you want hardware assembled specifically to run Linux on it.
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