5 Years of Pop _OS • Hacker News Board

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#111

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 9:16 AM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #106

pjmlp wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nodejs runs on mainframes, web development is the new green phosphor terminals, POSIX userland does it perfectly fine.

Project Astoria is coming back on Windows 11.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#112

Post by woopwoop24 » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 9:24 AM UTC

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…

tl:dr not a big fan

so much +1 for the worst possible alignment of the keys above the arrow keys, is why mine is not used anymore it just pisses me off constantly. (i reprogrammed the keyboard but it still is a bad experience even when disabled or remapped) the speakers on the bottom are also not doing a great either. i think i will get a framework as the next one. Also PopOS is confusing to configure, much rather have plain debian and live with the pain of setting it up, but it behaves deterministic.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#113

Post by philon » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 9:29 AM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #36

myself248 wrote: post #27

I'm a Linux idiot, just got sick of Windows, and took the plunge in 2016. (After some ill-fated tinkering in 1996 with Slackware, but we don't speak of that.) I started with Ubuntu and had a pretty good time for a year or two, until a dist-upgrade broke everything. Luckily /home/ was easy to restore from backup. So I was fine for another two years on Ubuntu until another dist-upgrade broke everything again. Sensing a…

If you look at my comment history, you'll see I'm a bit of a broken record, but my records don't break anymore after switching to NixOS. It was precisely the breakage after every upgrade that got me to try it. With declarative config-based reproduceable deployment that can be rolled-back, the broken OS doesn't need to be a thing anymore.

Hi colordrops I indeed checked your comment history :) would love to get in contact regarding support for our NixOS based infrastructure. Does Telegram @philon or Matrix philon@philon.tube work for you?

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#114

Post by ThatMedicIsASpy » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 9:31 AM UTC

Daegalus wrote: post #64

kccqzy wrote: post #32

I am quite a fan of their Pop!_Shell. I wanted to improve my desktop efficiency by using a tiling window manager; I tried i3wm and XMonad, but none of them really clicked with me. Finally, I decided to try the Pop!_Shell tiling mode and it was awesome. (Hardcore tiling window manager fans might not agree but Pop!_Shell is a lot more newbie-friendly.) Furthermore, you don't even have to install Pop!_OS to get Pop!_She…

it's the same on Fedora. I use Fedora Gnome with Pop Shell. works great. hopefully they keep maintaining it for gnome after they release cosmic.

I tried pop shell on fedora and ran into bugs. Trying to get nvidia drivers to work crashed the system so I just went back to pop

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#115

Post by int_19h » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 9:31 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #111

int_19h wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nodejs runs on mainframes, web development is the new green phosphor terminals, POSIX userland does it perfectly fine. Project Astoria is coming back on Windows 11.

Node.js runs on many things, but packages (which is the actual thing that people want) are another matter. I remember trying to npm install something on FreeBSD; you wouldn't believe how many package scripts straight up assume that /bin/bash is always there.

And yes, Android apps are already there on Win11, so it kinda came full circle. But either way, the point is that emulating Linux kernel was originally a choice made for the sake of Android compatibility. That it ended up providing a much-needed development environment is a fortunate side effect of that decision.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#116

Post by guilhas » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 9:38 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #67

And this is why the Linux desktop is domed to be a VM inside other OSes, or filled with Electron apps. Gtk, Qt, XFCE, GNOME and KDE applications will look out of place in the new desktop, and most likely they will never create a Rust based set of frameworks that can match the above ones on features, development tooling, and extensibility points for desktop developers.

The UI in windows is exactly the same. If I run a script to remove title bars/borders/close buttons on windows's windows only half the apps will do it, because of the different UI frameworks

Electron is a plague equally in all OSs

But I think the current trend is moving windows to be a VM/partition for gaming

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#117

Post by MattPalmer1086 » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 9:42 AM UTC

Wow, has it is only been around for 5 years? Been using it for over 3. It's very polished and runs fine on my ThinkPad.

Bluetooth sometimes won't connect to some things, but that was true of Ubuntu too. And I've never really relied on it for much anyway as I always find it a bit of a crap shoot whether devices in general will see each other or pair. So no great loss.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#118

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 9:55 AM UTC

listic wrote: post #19

chatterhead wrote: post #4

Congrats! Pop_OS rebuilt in Rust?? Sounds pretty sweet. Really wish I had enough money for a System76 PC. Go on there at least 10 times a year and build out a PC or two just to dream... Sorry for abandoning my cart with ridiculous PC specs built for one of those hoodie wearing hackers in media photos. Edit: I'm posting too fast so for the person commenting on what boards they use... https://tech-docs.system76.com - h…

Are their desktop PCs built around standard boards? I presume their 'Thelio' is Mini-ITX form factor? It sounds condescending of them to omit the exact model names of their hardware in their 'tech specs' section. I, for one, would like to know what exact model of motherboard I would be getting when I choose 'AMD' or 'Intel Advanced' in the 'Platform' section. Same goes for RAM, SSD, etc.

I looked at a Thelios, they have great info on GitHub including top-down images of the system internals, https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/system76/tech-docs...

On this one you can see they use a Gigabyte X299 Aorus Ultra Gaming Pro.

However, it's common to do replacements, so am exact model is only going to be possible with bespoke systems IME.

Did you try asking, most people only want a specific bundle of features and don't care about the model numbers per se.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#119

Post by fsflover » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 10:05 AM UTC

dm319 wrote: post #107

thisiswrongggg wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ther…

Debian recently voted to add proprietary firmware, so your devices should work by default.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#120

Post by stingraycharles » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 10:22 AM UTC

tomschlick wrote: post #16

stingraycharles wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I never understood why they are spending so much time on this. Seems like they would be better off improving the hardware offering, or just making generic integrations which work on any Linux distribution?

> or just making generic integrations which work on any Linux distribution Thats how you make something that doesnt look good or function that well because you're focusing on too much. They are taking the Apple path with linux. Make the hardware and make the software tailored for the hardware for a great experience. Yes they support people installing on stuff other than their hardware, but they make sure their hardwa…

But you need to have a pretty large ecosystem / platform to be the size of Apple to be actually benefiting from the huge investment it takes to maintain an OS / distribution like that. Especially the rewrite to Rust, it just makes me wonder the costs / benefits of this.

Isn't there a more reasonable middle-ground, e.g. just saying "we officially support Ubuntu / Fedora" or something like that, and making sure those two distros actually work well out of the box?

As an anecdote, I have got my framework laptop this summer, and it works really well out of the box pretty much anywhere. I'd argue that framework is a pretty direct competitor to system76, except framework seems to be innovating on the hardware part rather than the Linux distro part. Which makes way more sense business-wise to me.