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System76 Unveils Its Own Ubuntu-Based Linux Distribution Called 'Pop!_OS' (betanews.com)
BrianFagioli writes: Not content with simply following Canonical and embracing vanilla GNOME, System76 has decided to take its future into its own hands. Today, the company releases the first alpha of an all-new Linux-based operating system called "Pop!_OS," which will eventually be the only OS pre-loaded on its computers. While it will still be based on Ubuntu and GNOME, System76 is tweaking it with its own style and included drivers. In other words, the company is better controlling the user experience, and that is smart.
"The Pop!_OS community is in its infancy. This is a fantastic time to engage with and help develop the processes and practices that will govern the future development of the operating system and its community. The team is currently opening up planning for the development roadmap, code of conduct, discussion forums, and the processes surrounding code contribution. Progress made on Pop!_OS has established an inviting, modern, and minimalist look and has improved the first-use experience including streamlining installation and user setup. Work on the first release, scheduled for October 19th, centers on appearance, stability, and overall tightness of the user experience followed by adding new features and greater customization ability," says System76. You can check out the project on GitHub here and download the alpha ISO here. For more information, the company has set up a subreddi.
"The Pop!_OS community is in its infancy. This is a fantastic time to engage with and help develop the processes and practices that will govern the future development of the operating system and its community. The team is currently opening up planning for the development roadmap, code of conduct, discussion forums, and the processes surrounding code contribution. Progress made on Pop!_OS has established an inviting, modern, and minimalist look and has improved the first-use experience including streamlining installation and user setup. Work on the first release, scheduled for October 19th, centers on appearance, stability, and overall tightness of the user experience followed by adding new features and greater customization ability," says System76. You can check out the project on GitHub here and download the alpha ISO here. For more information, the company has set up a subreddi.
Well done.
Just like the overly enthusiastic parents that name their child "Jonn", or "Sarra", or "Madilene", you have now ensured that you will have to spell out the damn name every time you talk about it. And that "exclamation mark underscore" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
>"While it will still be based on Ubuntu and GNOME, "
Blech. So it is just Ubuntu with a few tweaks. Yawn. Nothing to see here, keep moving. Still, I wish System76 well- I like what they do!
System76 is hindered by Ubuntu because Ubuntu is hindered by Canonical. Surely there's a better source for a fork. I get that they have lots of Ubuntu experience and a history there, but Launchpad should be EOL.
As Linus pointed out, the systemd guys ignore bugs. As he said, they are "too cavalier about bugs." Ted Tso said "they don't consider or their responsibility to fix."
I'd be willing to live with the problems if they would just fix their logger.
The stubborness upon which Ubuntu and now System76 insist on choosing the clearly inferior choice (GNOME) when there's a much better option (KDE's Plasma), is impressive.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
"...Pop!_OS has established an inviting, modern, and minimalist look..."
Ugly flat interface. Probably with all the drop-down menus removed in favor of dumbed-down controls hidden behind cryptic icons. My experience with "modern" desktops has been uniformly negative. I mean, Windows, Mac, Gnome Shell, Unity...
Am I the only one who thinks the desktop environment and user interface was pretty well figured out and perfected by, say, ten years ago? Since then it's just been change for the sake of change (under the holy banner of "innovation") and misguided efforts to make desktop computers work like phones. The only present-day desktop that I find attractive and comfortable to use has been Ubuntu MATE, and their motto is "for a retrospective future".
System76 was Ubuntu before it was believed killed in the incident at Linux's Switzerland headquarters.
Who the fuck are System76 ?
If you don't know, you should go back to Reddit.
Do they really have to follow the crap things that we get phone manufacturers doing with Android? Adding their own "style" to it?! As for drivers, contribute those to Ubuntu so that everybody benefits from that work rather than just those using a downstream fork.
Ultimately this is just going to be "whatever RedHat decides" + "whatever Ubuntu decides" + "yet another not invented here syndrome UI styling" anyway.
And Pop!_OS? Really? I never thought I'd see the day that Microsoft's branding style would be a better option than anything, I think I would actually prefer System76 Operating System for System76 Systems 2017.
In other words, the company is better controlling the user experience, and that is smart.
Is that really smart? What attracts customers to System76 computers? Is it their superior software, or their (from what I've heard) sturdy, reliable hardware? You are given the choice between running Ubuntu or some obscure distribution that hardly anybody uses. System76 will probably not be able to make a community which is even the tenth of the size of the one for Ubuntu. If you run this distribution, few people will be able to help you if the issue happens on a component that differs even slightly from vanilla Ubuntu.
On a more general note, most of the software differentiation efforts that are run on Windows and Android have always looked to me like wasted efforts. When I buy a computer with Windows, one of the first things I will do is remove most, if not all of the manufacturer software that was bundled with it, since almost all of it is useless and/or undesirable. The situation on Android is even worse, in my opinion. The interface is often arbitrarily modified for no good reason, to the point that an upgrade of the Android version will move half the settings around. From having tried Nexus and Samsung phones, the GUI "improvements" are questionable at best, and they always make it difficult to make similar changes on different devices.
Here is a perfect example of why Linux was never a real competitor to OSX and Windows, instead of actually investing their time and money into an already established OS? Lets just follow a lame trend so old its an XKCD joke.
Because this is EXACTLY what Linux needed, yet another distro with just enough changes to make it incompatible with everyone else...sigh. Can you imagine how kick ass Linux would have been if instead of reinventing the damned wheel 600+ times everyone got together and invested their time into simply making ONE DISTRO that was the absolute best, cleanest, and bug free OS they could possibly build? It would make OSX and Windows look like DOS!
But no, instead we have SSDD, one of 600+ distros to pile on distrowatch which will probably either be dead in less than 3 years or have less users than win98 in 2017, because God forbid people actually work together for the common good instead of more NIH bullshit...sigh.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Quite agree. They should have called it Popi-Linux or some Linux, to make it obvious to the customer that it's Linux. Or if they did a FreeBSD based thing, they could have called it Popi Unix or Popi BSD.
Like I suggested, they should have improved on SteamOS, which is itself an Ubuntu distro
We now have two laptops that we bought with Linux preinstalled, and specs above Apple's at the time we ordered (in January). We didn't get them from Syst76 because delivering abroad from the US and with 'local' keyboards wasn't feasible for them, we ordered from Tuxedo in Germany. Honestly, from casings to processors they really look similar, there musn't be so many equipment suppliers.
Well, Tuxedo explain they also raised this question of developing their own versions of linux flavors (you can select which linux you want with Tux), but they instead chose to prepare a separate package dedicated to their hardwares, which one can apply after a standard linux install.
(Their commitment on this only works with a 'short list' of linux versions -most of them Ubuntu based IIRC.)
I believe, if you are serious in proposing a range of hardware with linux preinstalled, sooner or later you cannot but consider you are at risk whenever any linux update is issued, and these are issued in a manner you can't control.
Syst76 way is one reaction, Tuxedo's is another, but I do understand that when your full business is potentially killable by an unexpected update you think about it.
And when I say killable it's very real, just imagine suddenly all your machines do not support e. g. bluetooth -a single, minor feature like that. Within hours, in ten forums, hundreds of posters will insult you, you sell sh.., doesn't work, don't buy that.
I for one wouldn'd sleep before deciding for a strategy...
Herve S.
Mandriva, Xandros, Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, LinuxMint, Steam OS and now this... There is always someone who looks at Desktop Linux and thinks "this is 85% percent done, all it needs is a new coat of paint and some drivers/codecs". The hard reality is that, unless Desktop Linux distros solve the "not compatible even with itself" problem (hint: The 14.04 LTS I use in work cannot even have the latest version of VLC), Desktop Linux isn't going anywhere. Unless Desktop Linux manages to drop the idiotic "one repo per version" approach (which is contrary to the industry-standard approach of picking a "base" version and launching a single binary that works from that version all the way to the latest version, with differences being worked with static libraries and shims, Desktop Linux isn't going anywhere. That's how Windows, OS X, Android and iOS do it. I can download the latest version of VLC on Windows Vista, and it is the same .exe that Windows 10 uses.
Don't we have enough pop in our culture already?
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
Get rid of Systemd and I'll buy one ..
What if this had ALWAYS been done? We most likely wouldn't have many of the great things we have now. Would we have a single perfect linux distro? I think that is wishful thinking.
Just have a look at this: Linux Distro Timeline and tell me that none of those things should have happened. Maybe SOME of them shouldn't, but that's a simple determination in hindsight.
Just look at what Knoppix spawned, and what it inspired. Sometimes you have to let the ones passionate about something run with it. Otherwise, it's death-by-committee.
The biggest strength can also be the biggest downfall... so while complaining about all the multitude of distros, which is comically overwhelming, some really great things have come out of that process which I firmly believe wouldn't have happened with a single driving direction.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
> The 14.04 LTS I use in work cannot even have the latest version of VLC)
--You pick an LTS distro for *long-term stability*, not the latest versions of software. Things tend to break sometimes when you use the testing or unstable branches. I use 14.04-64-LTS myself, and it's pretty rock solid - but starting to show its age after 3 years. If I want newer versions of software, I put up a Vmware or Virtualbox VM and install Antix or MX (no systemd) or even go beyond my existing triple-boot setup if it really needs to run on bare metal.
--There are more choices than that (LMDE, Devuan, Fedora, SuSE, etc), but I tend to prefer Debian-derived package systems and something that can actually survive a dist-upgrade in-situ without reinstalling.
> I can download the latest version of VLC on Windows Vista, and it is the same .exe that Windows 10 uses
--Yep, and you have to deal with the in-OS spyware, rampant virus and malware/cryptoware infection risks along with it. We can all see how that's working out for the Ukraine.
--Snap packages show some promise, but since Ubuntu 16.04 was such a terrible experience for me I haven't looked into it yet. Dunno if they ported Snap back to 14.04, but they have backported rebootless kernel patching for it recently.
.
== WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
"You pick an LTS distro for *long-term stability*, not the latest versions of software." Windows 7 allows me to have *long-term stability* and have the latest versions of software, which means it relieves me from having to go through the "to LTS or not to LTS" dilemma. From that perspective, the price of a Windows license is a bargain. I can stay with the old version for years till I am ready to upgrade and still have new software like VLC. And without having to experiment with VMs and whatnot. "Yep, and you have to deal with the in-OS spyware, rampant virus and malware/cryptoware infection risks along with it. " Because as we all know, Desktop Linux is magically immune to cryptoware (despite the fact apps have access by default to the user's home directory). Also, no viruses for me for a decade. I just don't mess with the factory settings for Update (as you should on Desktop Linux too) and don't download junk executables from dubious places (as you should on Desktop Linux too). Also, take off the tinfoil hat.