Totally naive question, but is there any merit to Pop! OS continuing to be based on Ubuntu as opposed to Debian?
I ask because of the following developments that have happened over the past few years:
- System76 is gunning to develop their own COSMIC DE not based on GNOME
- Debian now officially supports non-free firmware in their ISO releases, meanwhile supporting this out of the box was kind of Ubuntu’s whole “raison d’etre” in the early days
- Canonical is forcing snaps on everyone, and is making it progressively harder to remove them from the system without having very real impacts (I’m hearing whispers online about them “snapifying” CUPS printer drivers), and to get around this System76 basically has to repackage some software into .deb files by hand and offer flatpak integration as an alternative if people want newer stuff.
Essentially, the conclusion I am drawing from all this information is that it’s going to get harder and harder to base things off of Ubuntu moving forward, and that other than newer packages (which is solved with flatpaks) there’s actually not a whole lot of benefit to basing things off of Ubuntu as opposed to a slightly tweaked Debian flavor…
So with all that said, I’m curious what the community and developers behind Pop! OS think about my line of reasoning. Are there any considerations being made to potentially shift to Debian as a base? If not, are there things I’m not considering? Or (and this is totally out of left field), is System76 planning to become a company somewhat resembling Canonical and create their own distro based on the Debian testing branch?
Would love to hear some thoughts on this, and apologies if this has been brought up before.
I can’t make any predictions, but I might see a few problems with moving to debian. Flatpaks are a pretty good replacement for lots of apps, but especially with stuff like drivers for Nvidia cards (and supporting Nvidia so well is something Pop!_OS seems to like), you just can’t get all the way with the debian repos.
I think if they were to move, imo it would be more realistic to use something like Fedora as a base.
I don’t know exactly why, but I think I will always prefer Debian or its derivatives over RHEL and its derivatives.
So I kind of get this, but from what I can understand it’s more tedious from a DevOps perspective to switch package management systems than to just switch to repositories that target older software versions. Hence why I’m curious as to whether simply basing off of Debian-testing like Ubuntu does is the most likely outcome.
As for NVIDIA support, I was playing around with the latest Debian release and almost immediately noticed that the NVIDIA proprietary packages were available by default. In other words, Debian seems to be just as inclined to support an NVIDIA setup as Ubuntu does out of the box now.
I just installed Debian 12 on an Nvidia box, I turn their non-free option on and didn’t really have much in the way of trouble. It wasn’t 100% clean sailing but it nothing that Pop couldn’t take care of in a couple of minor changes.