Pop!_OS 21.10: Radical distro shows potential but does not play nicely with others Stateside Linux laptop vendor System76 has released a new version of its own distro, which promptly messed up this hack's test laptop. Installing Pop!_OS Although its name alludes to the American revolution in 1776, System76 is rather younger. It was established in 2005, just a year after Ubuntu released its first version. …
I agree that replacing GRUB in a distro is probably not a good decision, but I'm not fond of it myself (although all my systems use it). It seems to have succumbed to the usual GNU process of accumulating cruft to deal with many edge cases. I've pondered replacing it with EXTLINUX, which can't do much else than boot Linux off an ext4 filesystem on a SATA disk, but that's all I ever need.
It's 2021, you should be selecting between/booting OS's using efi. Add a new OS entry with efibootmgr, pointed towards the correct (signed, naturally) bootloader. Expecting GRUB to probe for other OSs that might exist somewhere on your system is severely deprecated, especially since everything should be encrypted.
[Article author here]
Well, yes, that is the modern way, yes.
The thing is that in my personal experience, with various machines, UEFI can be more work and generally makes things more difficult. For instance, if – as happened here, and it wasn't the first time – the ESP gets b0rked, then it is significantly complex to recover from it.
Or, to pick another example, in a previous role of mine, I inherited a fairly high-end Dell workstation from a colleague who had left. Both of us, with decades of Linux experience between of us, could *not* get this box to boot from its own hard disk using Linux. We tried about a dozen distros between us, we tried BIOS-BOOT partitions, we tried everything we could find on t'Internet. Nothing.
He just loaded the kernel from a USB key and kept the rest of the OS on the hard disk. It worked, and so what if it was a bit slower.
I tried many things until in desperation I put Windows 10 on the thing. This worked perfectly, and with a Windows-created ESP, then Linux booted perfectly happily.
UEFI can be a massive pain. There are many variables, including nonstandard keystrokes to summon a boot-disk chooser, or one that is disabled by default, or which other CMOS settings prevent from working; buggy firmware; non-standard OSes that wreck things for every other OS on the box (such as happened this time), and so on.
BIOS boot and MBR is about 25 years older so by now it mostly Just Works™, and while it has some oddities, they're well-known oddities. TBH, I prefer it. I don't personally own anything with NVMe or >2TB disks or anything, so I only use UEFI on my testbed machine (and my Macs).
So, no, I disagree. I don't think the time is yet right to say "UEFI or the highway." I still have perfectly-working usable kit that doesn't support UEFI, and I still enjoy using OSes that don't support UEFI and probably never will.
... please explain to me why I should choose it over Fedora. Or OpenSUSE, or Gentoo.
The description matches pretty closely what I've experienced with PopOS two years ago. The only difference being that PopOS lasted exactly 20 minutes on that laptop.
[Article author here]
Yep, the last time I tried it was around then, too.
The tiling windows work surprisingly well, and it's easier than a dedicated tiling window manager. Integrated support for GPU switching is very nice to have, if your hardware has that: I have read horror stories of trying to configure it, and have had lots of pain myself with nVidia binary drivers -- for instance, on rolling-release distros where the kernel's too new, or when the user has a USB-C docking station and GPU output needs to be routed over USB to ports on the dock, even on desktop kit with no switching involved but different generations of nVidia GPU.
But I'd only recommend it as the sole OS on new hardware. And since that is not something I ever use, really... :shrug:
My experience with it was on an old MacBook Pro.
The Pros:
- It supports HiDPI out the box automatically. On other distros, that usually involves manually setting 2-3 environment variables at a minimum: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI
- It supports dual GPUs out the box
- It's font config doesn't make you want to gouge your eyes out of their sockets. Font handling on *IX has historically been suboptimal, which brought rise to the infamous Infinality bundle. A lot of Infinality got merged upstream, but not all, and it still requires manual tweaking on most distros
The Cons:
- I'm not a GNOME fan at all, I'm more of a LXqt/KDE kind of guy
- No Broadcom WiFi support out-of-the-box. A lot of distros are like this, and it was a fairly easy fix if you know Debian/Ubuntu
I think the target is really their own laptops, if it works on anything else that's a bonus. Did briefly look at a System76 a while ago, but ordering from the US was enough to put me off (also a bit more expensive for the specs than alternatives, which I might be happy with for a linux vendor, but didn't want to have to deal with sending for a warranty repair for example).
If you are comfortable in Gentoo then you are probably not a System 76 target customer, whereas I am - I have been using linux since redhat 5.1 and generally like cut down forms of linux, but for a desktop system I want something that 'just works' and POP-OS is the first linux desktop that does this for me, and it specifically does not have any cruft on it- very lean out of the box.
the ability to install tensorflow with gpu support in three lines of code is epicly simple as I had previously spent several days trying to get different generations of code base playing nicely together, and mostly failing.
The hardware is good quality and I like the values of the company - yes I pay a bit of premium but it's easily worth £1 a day it to me because of the time I don't waste trying to work out how to configure stuff. I want to use my time to do interesting stuff and earn money, not spend hours on stack exchange trying to deal with incompatible versions of software that don't play nicely together in the sandpit.
But the author is correct about the dual boot - it is PITA and I have also been caught out by this.
I have gone over to S76 hardware 3 years ago so I had linux on the desktop and it works fine - teams / zoom / evolution even plays nicely with office365 etc.
If you have a notebook using Intel OPTIMUS platform (shared graphics processing between chip and mobile GPU), Pop is a great option... no manual config necessary, provides menu driven options for GPUonly, chip only or GPU+Chip operations.
That being said, I'm not going 21.10 for the above stated reasons. Favorite OS is still Fedora on my desktop.
[Article author here]
I totally agree. GNOME 40, remarkably and incomprehensibly, is moving its vertical launcher thing and vertical workspace switcher to horizontal. Windows 11 removes the ability to have the taskbar vertical at all.
I often get the feeling that some current OS and desktop developers don't really know how to use the existing tools as well as I do, and because they don't know how to do this stuff, they think nobody does and so they remove it.
17 Dec. 2021
...the systemd team not being man enough to write an cobinned kernel+initrd in an EFI stub that can be booted standalone.
Prescient.
24 Oct 2022 - Pid Eins: Brave New Trusted Boot World
NN
I have switched between Debian, Ubuntu and a few others for decades. Decided to give Pop a try on a i7 (home built) PC, which I thought I might use for programming, learn a new language or two.
It's working quite smoothly without major probs, but I'm not comfortable with their preference for flatpak. Things like VS Code seem to need a lot more setup and messing around, making flatpak less appealing.
Now I'm getting notifications popping up telling me that I should reinstall some of the apps I chose to install from debs as the flatpak version is the only one getting future support.
It has been a nice experience, it's easy to use and doesn't look much like a Gnome DE, I can see it being an ok Linux for some types of user, but I don't think it will stay on this box for too long.
I've had a few problems from 20.04 21.04 and now 21.10 upgrade. 20.04. everything worked except my laptop speakers but I found a fix for that online. 21.04 the upgrade broke my system I needed to reinstall it with that version from a usb but it was painless the usb install found my old version and fixed it. 21.10 the latest 5.15 kernel doesn't work for my laptop. So I'm using it with Kernel version 5.13. I have a Lenovo Notebook I dual boot into windows and switch between the two OS with the bios menu. For me these problems are child's play compared to the struggles I've had setting up Debian 9 10 and 11 or Ubuntu which changes like the wind and won't change back it's just the Ubuntu way. Even Mint for me had issues but I hear Mint 20 is rock solid. I am a Linux user and die hard Debian fan. Yes we Debian users die hard lol fixing a lot of crap. For me PopOS is awesome it plays games and is extremely stable for everything else. System76 are far more forward thinking than any other Debian based Distributor and they really do work on hardware other than their own with dual boot. You just got to get used to switching through the bios and not the Grub menu. Haters are gonna hate I guess. So I call out the author on here. You can dual boot and it works great on other hardware don't believe me well give it a try.
So many comments from people avoiding an entire distro just because of the bootloader.
Really? That's your biggest concern about an OS? The bootloader? Not the hardware support? Not whether it helps you be more productive?
Seriously people, who CARES about the god damned bootloader.
Does it work /w a 4k screen? Can it successfully suspend/resume? It's 2021 and linux _still_ has problems with that!
I tried PopOS on a dell laptop and it was the single best distribution I had used to date, simply because it properly supported the hotkeys and other various laptop features without me having to spend several days googling and futzing with config files.
Here's an idea... instead of caring so much about a stupid bootloader that has very little material impact in your computer use, how about care about the fact linux still can't properly handle seamless switching from integrated to discrete graphics without having to re-login!
I'm going to chime in my $0.005 in the belief that, since most Linux users are /see themselves as advanced technical computer users, they focus on the advanced technical side of things.
Re: the rest of the world commonly complains about average-user Linux usability, and Linux's poor support of a lot of mainstream application packages, yet Linux users themselves would rather argue ad infinitum about Systemd, bootloaders, and KDE vs GNOME.
And then dream about why "Year of the Linux desktop" still hasn't come to pass because of "sheep Windows users".
The os-prober issue is not unique to System76 or Pop!OS. Ubuntu has the same issue as they are disabling it by default for the next LTS release. Apparently there's some "security implications" for disabling it which puts them in the same boat as System76. Yes, I would personally argue it's still better to use grub over systemd for something as this but ultimately, System76 probably didn't have the intention of "being unfriendly". Like Ubuntu, they likely had good intentions but didn't consider the full length of consequences for this change. One could argue that System76 being a hardware vendor--that they would then have a greater incentive to assure a consistent user experience that doesn't complicate the use of GNU/Linux, however, as it's already been mentioned... they cannot be held to different standards "just because". Pop!OS is still based on Ubuntu and Canonical has decided to shoot themselves in the foot with the same problem. Pop!OS has some "unique" innovations that don't make sense to people who clearly already have a preference but BECAUSE Pop!OS is still Linux, you can tailor it to suit your needs. One distro cannot satisfy every stupid person's wishes because they think the world revolves around them. That's why there's a fork for every desktop on almost every major distro now--needful or not, it is the way things are. I'm not justifying what Pop!OS is now but they aren't the only ones doing questionable things.... Canonical is shoving snapd down Ubuntu user's throats, Fedora is shoving a real crappy GNOME experience on their users, etc. Every pain point mentioned in this article likely has a workaround under Pop!OS because it's Linux. The problem is people want things spoon-fed to them despite this still being Linux--c'mon now.
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