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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.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
    • (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.

  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday January 16 2018, @03:57PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday January 16 2018, @03:57PM (#623156) Journal

    I'm confused by the review. All it talks about is the Desktop. Does the author not know that a desktop does not a distro make? What about the package manager or the utilities or the kernel or all the rest?

    Also, Pop!_OS is "cool because it's a continuation of Unity?" Are you kidding me? It was the double-whammy of Unity and GNOME3 that chased me off GNOME, where I had been for a decade, to XFCE and LXDE.

    The best part of the review was, after all that gushing about how beautiful the Unity-like desktop is, and confusing desktop for a distro, the author characterizes himself as a "power user." I don't smack my forehead as a rule, but I had to after reading that.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 2) by hubie on Tuesday January 16 2018, @07:26PM (5 children)

    by hubie (1068) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday January 16 2018, @07:26PM (#623241) Journal

    I am coming up to where I will be thanking my work laptop (Dell with Win7 and linux in a virtual machine) for its years of fine service. This time around I want to run linux with Windows in a virtual machine. Does anyone have experience or opinions on these guys for their laptops? Or for that matter, any of the other specialty vendors of linux laptops? From a technical or user perspective, do you get a lot of value out of the system (presumably from things like 100% driver compatibility, etc.) for the premium you pay?

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @12:13AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 17 2018, @12:13AM (#623364)

      Going back to 2009, Linux advocate Ken Starks[1] contacted System76 and they didn't have time for him. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [blogspot.com]

      To me, they sounded like Red Hat: just using Linux because it's gratis; those folks don't really get behind the *libre* thing (and the community).
      Perhaps they've changed since then.
      Daddy would say "They've already showed you their colors."

      [1] That's the guy who hit the ceiling when a teacher stole a kid's Linux CDs [blogspot.com] because she claimed that Free Software is illegal.

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

      • (Score: 2) by hubie on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:56PM

        by hubie (1068) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:56PM (#623799) Journal

        It is hard for me to get a feel for how rude they are/were from his comment. However, I did very much enjoy your second link to the school teacher's comments. It sounds like she "experimented" with linux in college, probably with some other illicit or immoral things as well!

      • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:28AM

        by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday January 18 2018, @12:28AM (#623924) Journal

        Going back to 2009, Linux advocate Ken Starks[1] contacted System76 and they didn't have time for him. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [blogspot.com]

        To me, they sounded like Red Hat: just using Linux because it's gratis; those folks don't really get behind the *libre* thing (and the community).
        Perhaps they've changed since then.
        Daddy would say "They've already showed you their colors."

        Well, I know they sponsor a number of linux-related podcasts and journalists -- Jupiter Broadcasting and Bryan Lunduke for example...although you could just say that's standard marketing. I've also read that they do contribute code back upstream, although I can't find any concrete examples of that. But they definitely have a lot of their own code published under the GPL on github, so there's that...

        From what I know of them, they do seem interested in contributing back to the community, although since they produce hardware rather than software there's not a ton for them to contribute in terms of source code. But they definitely contribute cash to various Linux outlets and conventions and such.

        Going back to 2009, Linux advocate Ken Starks[1] contacted System76 and they didn't have time for him. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [blogspot.com]

        I suspect there may be more to this. Would be interesting to see what his mail to them actually said. Comparing those two companies I noticed ZaReason ships computers with numerous different distros, while System76 standardizes on one -- previously it was Ubuntu, now it's Pop!. So, this guy sends both companies an email advertising the brand new distro he's created. ZaReason has their build system all set up for deploying any distro you want, so it would be easy enough to add one more to the list if it's any good, especially if it's targeting a niche that their existing choices don't. System76 isn't set up that way, they aren't going to ship some new niche distro, there's no reason they'd be interested. And he says himself that he didn't ask for anything, just introduced a distro that they were never going to use, so what did he expect them to do? Maybe their reply was a bit less polite than it could have been...maybe not...he hasn't posted any of the actual mails so we can't really know.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Wednesday January 17 2018, @12:44AM (1 child)

      by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday January 17 2018, @12:44AM (#623374) Journal

      Does anyone have experience or opinions on these guys for their laptops? Or for that matter, any of the other specialty vendors of linux laptops? From a technical or user perspective, do you get a lot of value out of the system (presumably from things like 100% driver compatibility, etc.) for the premium you pay?

      I bought a System76 four years ago...and I still think of it as "my new laptop". When I tell other people how old it is, they think I'm joking. It looks and feels like I got it last week. I don't care what the other vendors may offer, I'm not even gonna look, whenever I need to replace this thing I'm going straight back to System76.

      It was an expensive system -- the Bonobo Extreme (BONX8), the biggest laptop they had at the time, and I maxed out most of the available options. Cost me around $2k. But four years later it still runs everything I throw at it, never had a hardware failure, never had a driver or compatibility issue (and I use Arch, not the preinstalled Ubuntu), never had any problems at all (except reduced battery lifespan, but that's unavoidable). Build quality is excellent and it is by far the most serviceable laptop I've ever seen. My last laptop was a ~$700 HP, and in less than two years it was so beat up that you'd pick it up and there would literally be bits of plastic dropping off -- I beat the hell out of these things. And it doesn't help that taking apart cheap laptops generally damages them further, and I can never resist popping them open. But the Bonobo doesn't show any wear at all in twice the time. And it's the only place where I have a spare 2.5" drive bay, so any time I need to extract data from one of those, I crack it open and install the drive internally. But it's all metal screws and heavy plastics, no flimsy little tabs and decorative bits, so you could pop it open a thousand times and never have a problem.

      So yeah...if GHz/dollar is the only metric you care about, you might want to look elsewhere...but if you're willing to pay a bit of a premium for build quality and guaranteed compatibility, System76 definitely does deliver on those. I'm not going to say it's definitely worth the premium...that depends on how much you value your time, and probably how many times you've gotten burned by incompatible hardware. I don't think that's as much of an issue these days as it used to be, so maybe it's not so important. But I will say that System76 makes some seriously nice hardware.

      • (Score: 2) by hubie on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:53PM

        by hubie (1068) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 17 2018, @08:53PM (#623797) Journal

        Thank you This is just the kind of feedback I'm looking for.

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