Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

5 Years of Pop _OS

blog.system76.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 187 posts

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#51

Post by borodi »

smoldesu wrote: post #46
CoastalCoder wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluetooth works fine for me on both System76 Thelio and my Lenovo Legion laptop. Well, except for the crappy BT audio, but IIUC that problem isn't listed to Pop_OS.

> Well, except for the crappy BT audio, but IIUC that problem isn't listed to Pop_OS. Depends on if they've updated to PipeWire or not. PulseAudio/ALSA are terrible at negotiating Bluetooth connections, but PipeWire has been rock-solid in my experience. Since Pop is still on x11 they probably haven't updated yet, but it's likely coming soon.

Pop has pipewire since 22.04 IIRC.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#52

Post by blondin »

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 register. my taps, however, would register with me barely touching the pad, or finger scrolling. i have disabled tapping. and natural scrolling does not feel natural.

now, having page-up and page-down keys above the left and right arrow keys is a bad idea. it gives a bad user experience.

but of course, it's linux, you can remap the keys. you need a handful of commands for that. and since you are on a custom OS, you need to look at the base OSes. lucky me, someone wrote a blog post for ubuntu.

system76's discord is not (in my experience) where you get help. it is full of people who will ignore you. my impression is that they live in a bubble and are all doing similar things. you get the silent treatment for not doing things their way.

not sure what people are happy about with pop!_os. i spend my time looking through ubuntu and debian documentation. pop!_os docs are a series of articles and they are lacking. i am happy with what ubuntu and debian are doing! this custom OS does not make much difference in my opinion.

all that said, i will continue to support system76.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#53

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#54

Post by rgoulter »

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.

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 made). When things don't work in NixOS, it may be quite demanding/challenging to fix.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#55

Post by hanifvirani »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #9
bugfix-66 wrote: post #2

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

I had one of their systems, a gazelle professional 4 if I recall right, it must've been around, oh say, 2013? And it was quite a nice machine, great linux compat, the 4-core i7 in it performed quite well and it let me load it up with RAM. It wasn't too heavy or anything and I liked the display. But the battery life. Good lord. 45 minutes, 55 if I messed and fussed with power settings and such. Basically gaming-laptop…

I have a XPS 13 and I had arch on it but it would drain power while sleeping. The laptop would be dead overnight. Tried a lot of things but couldn't fix it. Had to go back to Windows.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#56

Post by anon291 »

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.

Yup. NixOS was the first OS I used where upgrades weren't a big deal. No time waiting for upgrades. No time worrying about them. No time not upgrading due to concerns about downtime. Systems do not break in weird ways, ever. Nix works exactly as advertised. The store is sacrosanct and nothing ever breaks. Lovely experience. Been running for almost five years now on the same setup. Run my mail servers on it too. No downtime (aside from like restarting once in a while due to hw upgrades). Extremely easy to use.

It's a waste of time learning all the debug and repair steps. With NixOS nothing breaks. No need to waste brain cells.

I realized how great it was when a friend asked me to fix his windows computer and I realized I had no idea that computers even broke in those ways anymore.

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#57

Post by robotburrito »

I liked pop_os for a while, but sadly gnome just freezes randomly on me now. I have seen it's an issue that many others have. Hopefully it's just my hardware or something and not indicative of a larger problem with the distro. When it is not crashing it's quite nice!

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#58

Post by smoldesu »

borodi wrote: post #51
smoldesu wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, except for the crappy BT audio, but IIUC that problem isn't listed to Pop_OS. Depends on if they've updated to PipeWire or not. PulseAudio/ALSA are terrible at negotiating Bluetooth connections, but PipeWire has been rock-solid in my experience. Since Pop is still on x11 they probably haven't updated yet, but it's likely coming soon.

Pop has pipewire since 22.04 IIRC.

Ah, very nice. Still a tad fresh, people who haven't updated to the latest LTS release might have missed it. That being said, it's totally the right call going forward. Very cool to see them using it with Xorg!

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#59

Post by anon291 »

gaganyaan wrote: post #39
colordrops wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just had NixOS break in a weird way for me. Ok, it was more that Gnome 42.4 broke the wsmatrix extension, which caused Gnome to shit itself[1] on login. It's a little bit of a double edged sword. NixOS lets me use pretty much straight upstream packages, which sometimes break due to not having thorough integration testing like a traditional distro would. On the other hand, I was able to just boot up an older configu…

> On the other hand, I was able to just boot up an older configuration to get back to functional, and that let me figure out wtf was wrong.

I would count this as not breaking. I mean... on most systems, you are borked if an upgrade fails and now need to boot a live CD. I've never had that happen on NixOS. I had it happen only once, and that was due to a bad ZFS setting that the OS couldn't possibly have fixed (weird BIOS thing where the SATA drives came up incorrectly).

Re: 5 Years of Pop _OS

#60

Post by qbasic_forever »

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…

Flatpak is optional, it's just setup out of the box so if you want to flatpak install stuff it just works. Their app center also shows flatpaks but has a drop down where you can pick either the deb or flatpak version if both are available.

And the tiling extension is off by default. It's just a little toggle in the (very nice) settings dialog to turn it on or off. You can totally uninstall it too as it's just a regular gnome extension (and you can even install it right now on non-pop gnome 3 systems).

Post reply on HN