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posted by Fnord666 on Monday January 15 2018, @08:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the It's-FOSS dept.

Linux system manufacturer System76 introduced a beautiful looking Linux distribution called Pop!_OS. But is Pop OS worth an install? Read the Pop OS review and find out yourself.

More at : https://itsfoss.com/pop-os-linux-review/


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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday January 15 2018, @10:06PM (5 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 15 2018, @10:06PM (#622774) Journal

    I know the answer. System 76 is thinking to differentiate their product from other Linux hardware by offering a custom Linux OS.

    But they are not thinking about what the customer actually wants.

    As a customer, I want standardization. I don't want almost standardization. Windows guys, try this: Buy brand X laptop with a customized version of Microsoft Windows! It works mostly like Windows, and all the apps we've installed so far seem to work!

    I want the mainstream Linux distro that I already know and trust. I want to have confidence that all the software works exactly as I expect. I am not amused by guessing games or wild goose chases when I'm trying to get something important done. (like choosing what desktop wallpaper I want this month.)

    If I want to customize the machine to have a unique look or other trivialities, I can and will do that. I got past that phase long ago. I want function with a very plain background and window decorations and everything works.

    If System 76 has an OS with some genuinely superior capability, then make it open source and offer it upstream, or as a new distribution that anyone can download and use on any hardware. Of if you are wanting to keep your custom OS to yourself, then I am definitely not interested -- because now we're talking about vendor lock in. I would need a perfect bug-for-bug OS that works like yours if I get another vendor's hardware.

    --
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2018, @11:19PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2018, @11:19PM (#622837)

    You might look at this as a win-win.

    On the one hand, System76 gets to do the branding via their Linux spin for n00bs.

    On the other hand, folks who don't cotton to that particular distro and were going to pave over what shipped with the hardware anyway and install their preferred distro will be certain that all the hardware has Linux support.

    Yeah, this is kinda an old meme; stuff that doesn't have Linux device drivers these days is getting to be like hen's teeth.
    AMD fumbled a quarter-billion-dollar RFQ some years back when they didn't have a Linux driver for their kit and the industry took notice of that.

    -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday January 16 2018, @11:49PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday January 16 2018, @11:49PM (#623356) Journal

      On the one hand, System76 gets to do the branding via their Linux spin for n00bs.

      On the other hand, folks who don't cotton to that particular distro and were going to pave over what shipped with the hardware anyway and install their preferred distro will be certain that all the hardware has Linux support.

      If that's what they were doing, it might make sense...but Pop!_OS really doesn't look like it's made for newbies, it's specifically advertised to power users, and it's a pretty minimal system -- basically nothing but a browser pre-installed. A new user would probably find plain Ubuntu to be easier, which is what System76 was previously shipping. So if they wanted to make things easier for newbies, they probably shouldn't have bothered.

      So I've come to the opinion that this is pretty much solely about branding. Pop is based on Ubuntu with Gnome, so if you like that, you might like Pop...but they were shipping plain Ubuntu for years already! So creating Pop doesn't give those users much benefit, except perhaps a bit less bloat. Anyone else is just gonna wipe it and install what they want anyway. And new users would probably be more comfortable with Ubuntu, where they can make use of the extensive community support and have some basic software pre-installed so they don't have to go hunting through the software center.

      But when they're demoing systems, or when you boot it up to get a good look at that screen before you wipe the thing...whose logo do you see? Ubuntu's, or System76's? That seems to be the biggest change they've made here.

  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Tuesday January 16 2018, @12:08AM (2 children)

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Tuesday January 16 2018, @12:08AM (#622861) Journal

    As a customer, I want standardization. I don't want almost standardization. Windows guys, try this: Buy brand X laptop with a customized version of Microsoft Windows! It works mostly like Windows, and all the apps we've installed so far seem to work!

    Apple does this to us with almost every release of OS X. Instead of just fixing it (which, sadly, it always has fairly serious need of), they fix it a little (never enough) and then they break it, sometimes quite thoroughly. App nap. Broken cron. "Buffered" program settings. Failure to reboot properly with a magic mouse attached. Regularly (every few days) dropped network connections (I'm talking ethernet here... by comparison, my Ubuntu servers haven't lost an ethernet connection in a year of 100% uptime.) UDP broadcasts that only work with one client. Booting broken if your HDMI / DVI monitors were connected A then B instead of B then A. Broken UTF-8 printing. Miserable (by which I mean, almost no) management of multiple ethernet ports. Etc. They're very happy to leave machines out in the cold, too - things that are outright broken, but can't be fixed with an OS upgrade, because they don't make an OS upgrade for that machine.

    It's immensely irritating.

    And that's besides what that ignorant cowflop has done, he who imposed the angry interior designer's defecation of flat iconography upon us, cursed be his name for ever and ever and ever, may his life be always as flat and lifeless as his "art."

    But there's only one OS X, and for all the pain, there's the rest, which I value highly. I also run Windows and linux each and every day, and it's OS X that always draws me back with, for me, the best balance of GUI and console power. And app ecosystem.

    Sigh.

    • (Score: 2) by damnbunni on Tuesday January 16 2018, @01:04AM

      by damnbunni (704) on Tuesday January 16 2018, @01:04AM (#622900) Journal

      This is pretty much why I use all sorts of OSes, but my main desktop is a Mac.

      All OSes suck, but the ways macOS sucks annoy me less than the ways Windows or Linux or *BSD or AmigaOS or Android suck.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @06:49AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 16 2018, @06:49AM (#623017)

      I now see why you need those shades.